The Linguistics Colloquium on Friday, November 09, 4:00pm in Oak Hall 112, will feature Donka Farkas, semanticist from UC Santa Cruz.

Non-intrusive Questions

This talk is part of a larger project whose aims are to understand the difference between canonical and non-canonical questions, and to draw a typology of the latter. The first part of the talk sets up a series of pragmatic assumptions present in canonical questions, assumptions that follow from the semantics and conventional discourse effects of canonical interrogatives. The second part presents a particular type of non-canonical questions, called non-intrusive. Non-intrusive questions signal the absence of one of the pragmatic assumptions associated with canonical questions, namely the assumption of Addressee Compliance, i.e, they signal that the Speaker does not assume that the Addressee will settle the issue in the next move. The case study discussed in detail is that of a special interrogative form in Romanian, namely an interrogative marked by the morpheme oare. In the account to be worked out in the talk, the role of this morpheme is to mark a special conventional discourse effect that affects the projected Addressee responses.

On Friday, November 2, 1-2pm in Oak Hall 338, Eno Agolli will present the paper “The Russell, the John, and the Katherine to the rescue of the-Predicativism”.

The Meaning Group is invited to a special session of Magdalena Kaufmann’s Semantics Seminar featuring guest speaker Ian Roberts (Linguistics, Cambridge University). He will be discussing his work on embedded sentences and complementizers. Note that this meeting runs longer than the usual Meaning Group slot (1:00-3:30pm) and takes place in the Business School building: BUSN 122.

Recommended reading: Ian Roberts & Anna Roussou (2003) Syntactic change: a minimalist approach to grammaticalization. Cambridge University Press. Chapter 3: C Elements (pp. 73-130), included below. For more information, contact Magdalena Kaufmann.

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The Meaning Group will meet on Friday, October 12, 1-2pm in Oak Hall 338 to discuss the paper “Complex Connectives” by Sarah Murray (2017, Proceedings of SALT 27, pages 655–679).

Muyi Yang will present her upcoming NELS talk “Causal networks in discourse: A case of Mandarin negative conditionals” at the LingLunch on Tuesday, October 02, 12:30-13:30 in Oak 338. Abstract below.

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The Logic Colloquium on Friday, September 28 at 2:00pm in Oak 112, will be given by Yael Sharvit (Linguistics, UCLA).

Temporal reference in non-specific indefinites

Non-specific indefinite noun phrases in attitude environments can be transparent or opaque. The interpretation of temporal expressions inside the indefinite is constrained by transparency/opacity. The first fact follows from standard assumptions about attitude reports; the second does not. I propose an account that derives both these facts.

On Friday, September 28, 1-2pm in Oak Hall 338, Teruyuki Mizuno and Muyi Yang will be presenting their upcoming NELS poster “Toward a unified account of Japanese evidential youda: a Causal Bayesian approach.” Abstract below.

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On Wednesday, May 2, at 2pm in Oak Hall 338, there will be a discussion of Kratzer’s recent paper “Chasing Hook: Quantified Indicative Conditionals.” This is a meeting of Ling 5402 (Semantics II); since the topic ties in with things we recently covered in the Meaning Group, the class graciously opened up its discussion to us.

(The paper is a pre-published version of 2015; it is to appear in the ever-forthcoming book “Conditionals, Probability and Paradox: Themes from the Philosophy of Dorothy Edgington” edited Walters and Hawthorne.)

The Logic Colloquium on Friday, April 27 at 2:30pm in Oak 112, will be given by Joe Buffington (Albany Law School).

The syntax and semantics of contractual offers

I will be talking about the syntax and semantics of contractual offers. In particular, I will be exploring whether there are any linguistic reasons for modeling contractual offers (as in, “If you do X for me, then I’ll do Y for you.”) as conditional promises, as is often taken to be the case in the legal literature.

We will be meeting on Tuesday, April 24, at 11am in Manchester Hall 227, for a talk by Woojin Chung (NYU Linguistics) on “Obligation as counterfactual reasoning”. Abstract below.

Obligation as counterfactual reasoning

Korean and Japanese modal expressions inform about the composition of deontic modality which is not evident from languages that express modal concepts via an auxiliary. They are expressed in terms of a conditional and an evaluative predicate ‘good’. I propose that obligation does not set up the domain of quantification in which the prejacent is evaluated. Instead, it makes deontic judgments as to what would be the case if the prejacent were true or false, respectively. I show that the proposed semantics offers a principled account of Zvolenszky’s puzzle (Zvolenszky 2002) and Ross’s paradox (Ross 1944).