On August 29, 11:30am-12:30pm in Oak Hall 338, Yusuke Yagi will present his work on Presuppositions in Disjunctions. Contact Stefan Kaufmann for a remote link.

We will meet on Thursday, April 27, 1:45-2:45 in Oak 338. Bill Lycan will present his ongoing work.

Explicature and Cancellability

Relevance theorists, most notably Robyn Carston, defend a notion they call “explicature,” that contrasts with mere conversational implicature in much the way that Grice’s “what is said” and semantic entailment do. But there is a puzzle: (i) As characterized, explicatures should not be cancellable in the way that conversational implicatures are. But (ii) in fact the standard examples of explicature are all cancellable, which you’d think is a serious objection to the Relevance theorists’ claim. Yet (iii) Carston not only grants but insists that explicatures are cancellable.

I try to solve that puzzle by pointing out something not often noticed, that “cancellable” is a relative term: cancellable without… what penalty? (And I believe that point is important independently of the explicature issue.)

We will meet on Thursday, April 20, 1:45-2:45 in Oak 371 (note the untypical room). Our own Omar Agha will present his ongoing work.

Focus-driven QUD accommodation in plural definites

Kriz (2015) and other recent work has drawn much attention to non-maximal interpretations of plural definite noun phrases. In Kriz’s model, non-maximality is possible when the QUD makes the exceptions irrelevant.

I present some novel observations that motivate an amendment of this theory. I show that plural definite noun phrases that associate with focus sensitive operators display more extreme non-maximality than plural definites without focus. This is especially apparent in out-of-the-blue contexts, where no particular QUD is assumed.

I sketch the beginning of a pragmatic theory of these facts, in which the presence of focus drives the listener to accommodate a QUD that is focus congruent, which in turn licenses exception tolerance.

Each year the UConn Logic Group chooses invites a distinguished “scholar of consequence” to deliver our Annual Logic Lecture. This year’s speaker is Maria Aloni (ILLC, University of Amsterdam). Her lecture will take place this Friday, March 31, 11am-1pm in ITE 336. This is an in-person event, but a zoom option will be available for those who cannot come (zoom link to be shared  by email).

Nothing is Logical

People often reason contrary to the prescriptions of classical logic. In the talk I will discuss some cases of divergence between everyday and logical-mathematical reasoning and propose that they are a consequence of a tendency in human cognition to neglect models which verify sentences by virtue of an empty configuration [neglect-zero tendency, Aloni 2022]. I will then introduce a bilateral state-based modal logic (BSML) which formally represents the neglect-zero tendency and can be used to rigorously study its impact on reasoning and interpretation. After discussing some of the applications, I will compare BSML with related systems (truthmaker semantics, possibility semantics, and inquisitive semantics) via translations into Modal Information Logic [van Benthem 2019].

Maria Aloni. Logic and conversation: The case of free choice, Semantics and Pragmatics, vol 15 (2022)
Johan van Benthem. Implicit and Explicit Stances in Logic, Journal of Philosophical Logic, vol 48, pages 571–601 (2019)

Maria Aloni (ILLC, University of Amsterdam), the Logic Groups “scholar of consequence” this year, will make an appearance in the semantics seminar on Thursday, March 30, 9:30-12:15 in HBL 2153. The session will begin with a presentation and discussion of her work on (non-)specific indefinites (title and abstract below). The latter part of the session will be devoted to the topic of her Annual Logic Lecture the following day. This is a paper which was discussed in the seminar earlier in the semester. Contact the instructors, Jon Gajewski and Magdalena Kaufmann, for details.

(Non-)specificity across languages: constancy, variation, -variation – Maria Aloni and Marco Degano

Abstract: Indefinites are known to give rise to different scopal (specific vs nonspecific) and epistemic (known vs unknown) uses. Farkas and Brasoveanu [2020] explained these specificity distinctions in terms of stability vs. variability in value assignments of the variable introduced by the indefinite. Typological research [Haspelmath, 1997] showed that indefinites have different
functional distributions with respect to these uses. In this work, we present a formal framework where Farkas and Brasoveanu [2020]’s ideas are rigorously formalized. We develop a two-sorted team semantics which integrates both scope and epistemic effects. We apply the framework to explain typological variety of indefinites, their restricted distribution and licensing conditions, and some diachronic developments of indefinite forms.

D. Farkas and A. Brasoveanu. Kinds of (Non)Specificity. The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, pages 1–26, 2020.
M. Haspelmath. Indefinite Pronouns. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Magdalena Kaufmann and Stefan Kaufmann will each give an invited talk at the METU Workshop on Conditional and Causal Reasoning, March 22-23, in Gökova-Akyaka, Muğla, Turkey.

We will meet on Thursday, March 09, at 1:45 in Oak 338, to discuss Paolo Santorio’s 2012 paper “Reference and Monstrosity” (The Philosophical Review 121 (3): 359–406). An online option will be available; please contact us for details.

The Meaning Group will meet on Thursday, March 2, 1:45-2:45 in Oak 338. Muyi Yang will present her new work. Title and abstract below. There will be an online option; for login instructions, see the email announcement or contact us.

Back to Boolean: Propositional conjunction in attitude ascriptions revisited

Abstract: Pluralities (i.e. sums of atomic objects) have been argued to be necessary for domains of a wide range of objects other than entities, such as predicates (Krifka 1990), worlds (Schlenker 2004) and propositions (Marty 2019 a.o.). This paper reexamines the view that propositions can be pluralized (Marty 2019, Schmitt 2019, 2020), and shows that this view runs into an overgeneration problem of propositions embedded under attitude predicates. Based on novel data of nominal and propositional conjunction in Japanese, I propose a solution based on a system without propositional pluralities.

The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature a talk on semantics by Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; currently Yale University) on Friday, February 24, 2pm. The talk will be in hybrid form.

Modeling Linguistic Causation

This talk introduces a systematic way of analyzing the semantics of causative linguistic expressions, and of how natural languages express causal relationships. For this purpose, I will employ the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) framework and demonstrate how this method offers a rigorous model-theoretic approach to examining the distinct semantics of causal expressions. This paper introduces formal logical definitions of different types of conditions using SEM networks, and illustrates how this proposal, along with its formal tools, can help to clarify the asymmetric entailment relationship among different causative constructions.

 

The UConn Linguistics Colloquium on Friday, February 17, 4-6pm will feature Robert Stalnaker (MIT Philosophy). A few things:

• Please fill out this form before this Wednesday if you decide to join the buffet after the talk
• Title & Abstract of the talk (below)
• Handout (we’ll also provide printed copies at the talk)
• Zoom link (see the email announcement or contact the organizers)

 

PRAGMATICS AND SEMANTICS OF BELIEF ATTRIBUTION, DE RE AND DE DICTO

My main concern in this talk will be about the relation between pragmatic and semantic elements in an analysis of ascription of belief and other propositional attitudes, with an eye on more general methodological issues concerning pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena.  My discussion will focus on two papers by Saul Kripke, one about the logical relation between de dicto and de re belief sentences (sentences of the form, ‘x believes that a is F’ and sentences of the form ‘x believes of a that it is F’ or ‘x believes a to be F’) and one that raises, but does not solve, a puzzle about de dicto beliefs about particular individuals.