On Friday, 02/08/2023, we will meet at 1:45 in Oak 338 to discuss Saul Kripke’s “Unrestricted exportation and some morals for the philosophy of language” in Philosophical Troubles.”
Author: Jon Gajewski
Meeting on 11/17: Gan
On Thursday 11/17, 1:00-2:00pm in Bousfield A101-A, Eva Gan will present some original work entitled “Indexical shift and perspective blend in Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL)”.
Meeting on 11/10: Mandelkern and Dorst 2022
On 11/10 at 1pm in Bousfield A101-A, Xuetong Yuan will lead us in a discussion of Mandelkern and Dorst 2022 “Assertion is Weak.”
Meeting on 11/3: Kuhn 2021
On Thursday 11/3 at 1:00pm in Bousfield A101-A, Yusuke Yagi will present Kuhn 2021 ‘The dynamics of negative concord.’
Meeting on 10/27: Teru Mizuno
We will meet on Thursday, October 27 at 1pm in Bousfield A101-A.
Teru Mizuno will present some ongoing dissertation research. See title, abstract and suggested background reading below.
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Title: Composing counterfactual desire reports
Abstract: Counterfactual desire reports, expressed for instance by English ‘wish‘, describe one’s desires whose attainment is deemed unlikely or impossible at the actual world. Building on cross-linguistic comparison across languages, especially, English, Greek, Spanish, Slovenian and Japanese, I propose a novel, fine-grained compositional account of counterfactual desire reports.
Suggested reading:
von Fintel and Iatridou (2022) ‘Prolegomena to a theory of X-marking’ (http://lingphil.scripts.mit.edu/papers/iatridou/fintel-iatridou-2020-x.pdf)
Meeting on 10/6: Muyi Yang
On October 6th at 1pm in Bousfield A101-A, Muyi Yang will present a part of her ongoing dissertation research:
Conditional questions as definite descriptions
Abstract: Although conditional questions like “If we throw a party next week, who should we invite?” have been studied in the literature of formal semantics (Isaacs & Rawlins 2008), conditional questions about elements inside the antecedents that are allowed in many wh-in-situ languages have remained largely unnoticed. This paper discusses a phenomenon in Japanese (and Korean) that some conditional markers block wh-questions about elements inside conditional antecedents. I adopt the recent analysis of conditionals as definite descriptions (Schlenker 2004 a.o.), and argue that this blocking effect of wh-elements inside conditional antecedents is an analogue of the ban on wh-extraction out of anaphoric definites discussed by Simonenko (2015).
Meeting on 4/28: Yang practice talk for SALT
Muyi Yang will present a practice of her SALT talk “Singularity and plurality of discourse reference to worlds.”
Meeting on 4/14: Bledin & Rawlins 2020
We will have a meeting this Thursday, April 14 from 12:45 to 1:45 in Oak 338.
Xuetong Yuan will lead a discussion of the paper “Resistance and Resolution: Attentional Dynamics in Discourse” by Bledin and Rawlins, 2020.
Find the paper at the link below.
https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/37/1/43/5734752
Meeting on 4/7: Tellings 2021
This week Muyi Yang will lead us in a discussion of “When if or when specify modals” by Jos Tellings.
The meeting is at the usual time: Thursday, April 7 at 12:45-1:45 in Oak 338.
Find the link to the paper below.
http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/38/paper3589.pdf
Meeting on 3/31: Prince 2019
We will meet this Thursday 3/31 from 12:45 to 1:45 in Oak 338 to discuss “Counterfactuality and Past” by Kilu von Prince.
Stefan will lead the discussion. You can find open access to the paper at the link below.
https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10988-019-09259-6.pdf