We will meet on Wednesday, 09/23, 1:30-2:30pm in SSH 338. Yusuke Yagi will present more of his work:

Scope of wh-questions in Japanese

Abstract: Abstract: This is a sequel to the talk last week, but I shift the attention to questions. I discuss two phenomena: (i) the observation made by Lasnik and Saito on scope reconstruction of scrambled wh-phrases and a Condition C effect; (ii) the wh-island and superiority effects. Though the topic might sound quite syntactic, I will try to argue that they tell us a lot about semantics as well.

We will meet on Wednesday, 09/16, 1:30-2:30pm in SSH 338. Yusuke Yagi will present his work:

Alternatives and Dynamics of Japanese Universal Quantification

Abstract: This talk will examine the interpretation(s) of indeterminate universal quantification in Japanese, arguing for the augmentation of Alternative Semantics and Dynamics Semantics. A discussion follows about whether the augmentation is an `overkill’ — is it a technical redundancy, or is it something we need to accept?

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)”.

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.”

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)

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).