The Logic Colloquium on Friday, November 08, 1:30-3:00pm in the Humanities Institute, will feature Pauline Jacobsen, semanticist from Brown University. Title and abstract below.

Variable Free Semantics: Putting competition effects where they belong

This talk will have two parts. First I will discuss the approach to semantics making no use of variable names, indices, or assignment functions that I have advocated in a series of papers (see especially Jacobson, 1999, Linguistics and Philosophy and 2000, Natural Language Semantics, also exposited in Jacobson 2014 textbook Compositional Semantics, OUP).    There are a number of theoretical and empirical advantages to this approach, which will be just briefly reviewed. To mention the most obvious theoretical advantage: the standard use of variable names and indices in semantics requires meanings to be relativized to assignment functions (assignments of values to the variable names), adding a layer to the semantic machinery. This program eliminates this and treats all meanings as ‘healthy’ model theoretic objects (the meaning of a pronoun, for example, is simply the identity function on individuals, not a function from assignments to individuals).   I will then show a new empirical payoff, which concerns competition effects found in ellipsis constructions.  These competition effects have gone under the rubric of MaxElide in the linguistics literature.  One example centers on the contrast in (1) (on the reading where each candidates hope is about their own success):

(1)	a.		Harris is hoping that South Carolina will seal the nomination for her, and Warren is too. (= ‘hoping that it will seal nomination for  her (Warren)’)
	b.	?*	Harris is hoping that South Carolina will seal the nomination for her, and Warren is also hoping that it will (=’seal the nomination for  her (Warren)’)

The ‘standard’ wisdom is there is a constraint in the grammar that when material is ‘missing’ (or, ‘elided’) if a bigger constituent can be elided, the bigger ellipsis is required. Why the grammar should contain such a constraint is a total mystery; moreover I and others have argued elsewhere that grammatical competition constraints represent a real complication in the grammar. When there are competition effects they should be located in speakers and hearers (we know that speakers and hearers do  compute alternatives – Gricean reasoning, for example, is based on that assumption).  Under the variable free account, the missing material in (1a) is of a different type than that in (1b).  In (1a), the listener need only supply the property ‘be an x such that x hopes that SC will seal nomination for x’ which is the meaning of the VP in the first clause.  In (1b) what must be supplied is the 2-place relation ‘seal the nomination for’ (note that this is in part because the pronoun her in the first clause is not a variable, and so [[seal the nomination for her]] is the function from an individual x to the property of sealing the nomination for x, which in turn is the two place relation named above.  The competition effect is thus about types not size, and can be given a plausible explanation in terms of communicative pressures.  Assuming that meanings of more complex types are more difficult to access than those of simpler types, there is a pressure for speakers to choose the simpler type ellipsis.  The type competition story crucially relies on the claim that expressions containing pronouns unbound within them denote functions from individuals to something rather than functions from assignment functions.

The UConn Logic Group‘s Scholar of Consequence this year is Chris Kennedy, semanticist from the University of Chicago. He will be speaking on Friday, November 01, 1:30-3:00pm, in BUSN 127 (that’s in the Business School – note the unusual location). Title and abstract below.

Expressing experience: Not necessarily ‘stoned’, but ‘beautiful’

It has been frequently observed in the literature that assertions of sentences containing predicates of personal taste like ‘tasty’ and ‘fun’ give rise to an acquaintance inference that is not present in assertions of sentences containing non-subjective predicates. An utterance of “sea urchin is tasty,” for example, implies that the speaker has first-hand experience of the taste of sea urchin, but an utterance of “sea urchin is orange” does not imply first-hand experience of the color of sea urchin. The goal of this talk is to develop and defend a broadly expressivist account of this phenomenon: acquaintance inferences arise because plain sentences containing subjective predicates are designed to express distinguished kinds of mental states, which differ from beliefs in that they can only be acquired by undergoing certain experiences. The resulting framework accounts for a range of data surrounding acquaintance inferences, as well as for striking parallels between acquaintance inferences in subjective predication and the kind of considerations that have fueled motivational internalism about the language of morals.

This year’s Logic Group Scholar of Consequence, Chris Kennedy (UChicago), will be presenting some of his work in the Semantics Seminar co-taught by Stefan Kaufmann and Stewart Shapiro (listed as LING 6410 and PHIL 5342). The session takes place on Thursday, October 31, 1:30-4:00pm in Oak Hall 338 (the usual Meaning Group meeting room). This session is open to everyone interested. Chris will be discussing work on gradability in aspectual composition. Two papers that give some background are attached.

The Logic Colloquium on Friday, October 25, will feature Peter Pagin (Stokholm) with a talk of interest to semanticists (title and abstract below). Note the unusual time and place: 4pm, McHugh Hall 106.

Title: Indexicals, Time, and Compositionality

Abstract: Kaplan’s official argument in “Demonstratives” for Temporalism, the view that some English sentences express propositions that can vary in truth value across time, is the so-called Operator Argument: temporal operators, such as “sometimes”, would be vacuous without such propositions.

Equally important is the argument from compositionality. Without temporal propositions, the sentences

(I) It is raining where John is
(2) It is raining where John is now

would express the same proposition. But they embed differently:

(3) Sometimes, it is raining where John is
(4) Sometimes it is raining where John is now

(3) and (4) express distinct propositions, so if they both are of the form “Sometimes, p”, and if (1) and (2) express the same proposition, we have a violation of compositionality.

In this talk it is shown that with Switcher Semantics, which allows for a generalized form of compositionality, we can have the result that (1) and (2) agree in content when unembedded (assertoric content) but differ in content when embedded under temporal operators (ingredient sense).

We can also show that Switcher Semantics, over Kaplan’s models, preserves the validities in the Logic of Demonstratives. All in all, the arguments for Temporalism are substantially undermined.

We will be meeting on Friday, October 18, 12:15-1:30pm in Oak 338. We will be discussing the paper “A unified semantics for the Japanese Q-particle ka in indefinites, questions and disjunctions” by Wataru Uegaki, Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 3(1), 14.

We will be meeting on Friday, October 4, 12:15-1:15pm in Oak 338. Our own Éno Agolli will be presenting his paper ” Proper Names Properly Situated” (attached).

We will be meeting on Friday, September 27, 12:15-1:15pm in Oak 338. We will be discussing the paper “Attitudes in discourse: Italian polar questions and the particle mica” by Ilaria Frana and Kyle Rawlins (forthcoming in Semantics and Pragmatics).

We will be meeting on Friday, September 20, 12:15-1:15pm in Oak 338. We will be discussing the paper “Counterfactuals, Negation, and Polarity” by Michela Ippolito and Julia Su (2014).

We will meet on Friday, September 13, 12:15-1:15pm in Oak 338. We will be discussing the paper “Relevance Topics” by Sophie Repp (Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 11, 2015). The paper is attached.

We will be meeting on Friday, September 6, 12:15-1:15pm in Oak 338. We will be discussing the manuscript “A problem about preference” by Thony Gillies (attached).