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Talk of interest on 04/05: Valentine Hacquard

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The Linguistics Colloquium on Friday, April 5, 4:00 in Oak Hall 112, will feature Valentine Hacquard (Linguistics Maryland).

What to learn in learning attitude and modal meanings

Abstract: This talk explores the acquisition of modal and attitude verbs. These words do not name concrete objects, and their uses do not have reliable physical correlates. Consequently their acquisition may rely heavily on cues from the linguistic context. Reporting on three case studies, I will discuss what experience children have with these words, what the learnability problems arise for each, and how children might succeed. We will see what syntactic and pragmatic cues to meaning are (and are not) found in this input, and what capacities children would need to detect and make use of them.

Meeting on WEDNESDAY, 03/06: Chris Tancredi

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The Meaning group will have a special meeting at an unusual time with an outside speaker. Everyone is welcome.

Wednesday, March 6, 9:30-10:45am, Oak Hall 338

Speaker: Chris Tancredi (Keio University, Japan)

Title: De dicto, de re and de qualitate unified

Abstract:

Past approaches to the semantics of belief statements have argued for a multiplicity of distinct interpretations, including de dicto, de re, de qualitate and de translato.  The need for ambiguity in attitude statements is clear from the potential truth of sentences like Ralph believes Ortcutt is a spy, but he doesn’t believe ORTCUTT is a spy.  However, I argue that the only ambiguity specific to attitude statements is the de translato/non-de translato distinction.  In particular, I show how to reduce de dicto/de re/de qualitate interpretations to a single form.  The key to the reduction is to analyze the embedded clause of an attitude statement as denoting a proposition inferable from an underlying belief of the subject rather than denoting the subject’s underlying belief itself.  I show that the semantics developed can account for attitudes toward necessary as well as impossible propositions, and that it further can account for the range of entailments felt to hold among multiple attitude statements.

Meeting on 01/25: Uegaki 2018

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The Meaning Group will have its first meeting of the semester on Friday January 25, at 12:45pm in Oak Hall 308. We will be discussing the paper “On the projection of the presupposition of embedded questions” by Wataru Uegaki (Proceedings of SALT 28, 2018). The paper is included below.

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Talk of interest on 12/07: Scott AnderBois, Brown

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The Logic Colloquium on Friday, December 7, at 2:00-3:30pm in Oak Hall 112, will feature Scott AnderBois (Linguistics, Brown University)

At-issueness in direct quotation: the case of Mayan quotatives

Abstract: In addition to verba dicendi, languages have a bunch of different other grammatical devices for encoding reported speech. While not common in Indo-European languages, two of the most common such elements cross-linguistically are reportative evidentials and quotatives. Quotatives have been much less discussed then either verba dicendi or reportatives, both in descriptive/typological literature and especially in formal semantic work. While quotatives haven’t been formally analyzed in detail previously to my knowledge, several recent works on reported speech constructions in general have suggested in passing that they pattern either with verba dicendi or with reportatives. Drawing on data from Yucatec Maya, I argue that they differ from both since they present direct quotation (like verba dicendi) but make a conventional at-issueness distinction (like reportatives). To account for these facts, I develop an account of quotatives by combining an extended Farkas & Bruce 2010-style discourse scoreboard with bicontextualism (building on Eckardt 2014’s work on Free Indirect Discourse).