We will meet on Tuesday, February 13, 11am-noon in Manchester Hall 227, to discuss the paper “The Surface-compositional Semantics of English Intonation” by Mark Steedman (Language, Volume 90, Number 1, March 2014, pp. 2-57). Notice that all the intonation examples have online sound files.

We will meet on Tuesday, February 6, 11am-noon in Manchester Hall 227, to discuss the paper “Must φ is felicitous only if φ is not known” by Daniel Goodhue (Semantics and Pragmatics 10).

Our first meeting of the spring semester will take place on Tuesday, January 30, 11:00-12:00 in Manchester Hall Room 227. Jon Gajewski (UConn Linguistics) will be presenting his own work. Title and abstract below.

 

It’s not syntax, I don’t think: neg-raising and parentheticals

English allows a construction in which a sentence contains a parenthetical with a clausal gap, as in (i).  I will refer to phrases such as I think in (i) as clausal parentheticals.  Typically, clausal parentheticals cannot be negative, cf. (ii).

(i) There is beer in the fridge, I think.

(ii) *There is beer in the fridge, I don’t think.

It has been noted that when the clausal parenthetical contains a neg-raising predicate, an apparent doubling of a negation in the main clause is allowed, as in (ii).

(ii)           There is no beer in the fridge, I (don’t) think.

This doubling has been taken to be an argument in favor of syntactic approaches to neg-raising, as in Ross (1973) and Collins & Postal (2014). I will defend an analysis of the doubling in (ii) that is compatible with a semantic/pragmatic approach to neg-raising, as in Horn 1989, Gajewski 2007, Romoli 2013.

The Logic Colloquium on Friday, November 17, at 2pm in Oak Hall 110, will feature Joshua Knobe (Yale).

Moral Disagreement and Moral Semantics

When speakers utter conflicting moral sentences (“X is wrong”/“X is not wrong”), it seems clear that they disagree. It has often been suggested that the fact that the speakers disagree gives us evidence for a claim about the semantics of the sentences they are uttering. Specifically, it has been suggested that the existence of the disagreement gives us reason to infer that there must be an incompatibility between the contents of these sentences (i.e., that it has to be the case that at least one of them is incorrect). This inference then plays a key role in a now-standard argument against certain theories in moral semantics. In this paper, we introduce new evidence that bears on this debate. We show that there are moral conflict cases in which people are inclined to say both (a) that the two speakers disagree and (b) that it is not the case at least one of them must be saying something incorrect. We then explore how we might understand such disagreements. As a proof of concept, we sketch an account of the concept of disagreement and an independently motivated theory of moral semantics which, together, explain the possibility of such cases.

We will have our last meeting of the semester this week (Friday, 2pm in Oak 338).  Sarah Zobel  (University of Tuebingen/MIT) will present some recent work on “as”-phrases.

Modals and the restrictive potential of weak adjunct “as”-phrases

Stump (1985) discusses the behavior of free adjuncts, like the sentence-initial adjuncts in (1). He observes that certain free adjuncts (which he calls “weak”) give rise to an ambiguity in case they co-occur with temporal or modal quantifiers (i.e., modals, adverbs of quantification, Gen/Hab), see (1a): the content contributed by a weak adjunct can be understood as relating to the remainder of the sentence causally or as restricting the co-occurring quantifier. Weak adjuncts contrast with so-called “strong” adjuncts, which only allow for the non-restrictive, causal interpretation, see (1b).

(1)	a.	As a passenger of Lufthansa, Peter would be content.	(weak)
		(Possible: Since Peter is a passenger of Lufthansa, he would be content.)
		(Possible: If Peter were a passenger of Lufthansa, he would be content.)
	b.	Being a passenger of Lufthansa, Peter would be content.	(strong)
		(Only Possible: Since Peter is a passenger of Lufthansa, he would be content.)
		(Not possible: If Peter were a passenger of Lufthansa, he would be content.

In this talk, I take a closer look at weak adjunct “as”-phrases (e.g., (1a)) and further investigate their restrictive possibilities. Starting out, I present an analysis of the semantic contribution of “as”-phrases (inspired by Stump 1985 and Jäger 2003), and propose an account for how the restrictive interpretation arises. I then explore the predictions of the account regarding the restrictive potential of “as”-phrases when they co-occur with different types of modals, which connect to previously observed puzzles in the semantics of modals.

The Philosophy Colloquium on Friday, November 17, at 4pm in FSB 217, will feature Janice Dowell, philosopher from Syracuse.

Normative Questions Semantics Should Not Settle

“The semantic analysis tells us what is true (at a world) under an ordering.  It modestly declines to choose the proper ordering.  That is work for a moralist, not a semanticist.” D. Lewis (1978: 85-6.)

Call “Semantic Neutrality” the presumptive requirement that a semantics for deontic modal sentences in a natural language should be neutral between plausible candidate normative theories about what morality (and more broadly, practical rationality) requires, permits, and forbids. Here I consider a variety of cases in which such a requirement appears pretheoretically attractive. I then assess how well recent contextualist rivals to Angelika Kratzer’s own formal semantics fare in meeting this requirement in those cases.  As I hope to show, the flexibility of Kratzer’s semantics permits a wide degree of neutrality not clearly available in those rival theories, constituting a powerful attraction in its favor.

The Logic Colloquium on Friday, November 17, at 2pm in Laurel Hall 108, will feature Una Stojnić, semanticist from Columbia and ANU.

The Logic and Grammar of Prominence

The recent literature maintains that the behavior of modal expressions motivates a non-truth-conditional account of their meaning, and non-classical account of their underlying logic. The key aspect of interpretation of modal claims is the characteristic dynamic effect they have on the context, and the corresponding dynamic notion of validity captures their seemingly non-classical behavior.  While prima facie supported by the puzzling behavior of modals in discourse, I argue that this approach is empirically inadequate. Instead I develop and argue for a dynamic theory of context-change which assigns standard truth-conditional meaning to modal utterances, and a corresponding dynamic notion of validity which preserves classical logic.

The Linguistics Colloquium Series is having a talk by Rajesh Bhatt (UMass Amherst) on Friday, Nov. 10th, in Oak 112, at 4:00pm.

Polar Questions, Selection and Disjunction: clues from Hindi-Urdu ‘kyaa’
[joint work with Veneeta Dayal, Rutgers]

Hindi-Urdu has an optional marker `kyaa’ that appears in polar and alternative questions. We delineate its properties distinguishing it from the homophonous thematic `kyaa’ (what); in particular we locate it in ForceP.  We demonstrate that its distribution in embedded environments is similar to that of embedded inversion in English.

We show that its interaction with disjunctive questions (alternative or polar) supports a treatment of the semantics of polar questions as denoting a singleton set {p} rather than the more commonly assumed {p, not p}. Our proposal offers a unified treatment of alternative and polar questions.

We will continue our discussion of the classic dissertation “Studies on the semantics of questions and the pragmatics of answers” by Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof (University of Amsterdam, 1984). This Friday we will focus on Part II, Section 3 (starting on page 102).

The Logic Colloquium on Friday, October 6, at 2pm in in Laurel Hall 108, will feature Emar Maier, semanticist from Groeningen.

Eventive vs. Evidential Speech Reports