The Meaning Group will meet on Thursday, March 2, 1:45-2:45 in Oak 338. Muyi Yang will present her new work. Title and abstract below. There will be an online option; for login instructions, see the email announcement or contact us.

Back to Boolean: Propositional conjunction in attitude ascriptions revisited

Abstract: Pluralities (i.e. sums of atomic objects) have been argued to be necessary for domains of a wide range of objects other than entities, such as predicates (Krifka 1990), worlds (Schlenker 2004) and propositions (Marty 2019 a.o.). This paper reexamines the view that propositions can be pluralized (Marty 2019, Schmitt 2019, 2020), and shows that this view runs into an overgeneration problem of propositions embedded under attitude predicates. Based on novel data of nominal and propositional conjunction in Japanese, I propose a solution based on a system without propositional pluralities.

The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature a talk on semantics by Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; currently Yale University) on Friday, February 24, 2pm. The talk will be in hybrid form.

Modeling Linguistic Causation

This talk introduces a systematic way of analyzing the semantics of causative linguistic expressions, and of how natural languages express causal relationships. For this purpose, I will employ the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) framework and demonstrate how this method offers a rigorous model-theoretic approach to examining the distinct semantics of causal expressions. This paper introduces formal logical definitions of different types of conditions using SEM networks, and illustrates how this proposal, along with its formal tools, can help to clarify the asymmetric entailment relationship among different causative constructions.

 

The UConn Linguistics Colloquium on Friday, February 17, 4-6pm will feature Robert Stalnaker (MIT Philosophy). A few things:

• Please fill out this form before this Wednesday if you decide to join the buffet after the talk
• Title & Abstract of the talk (below)
• Handout (we’ll also provide printed copies at the talk)
• Zoom link (see the email announcement or contact the organizers)

 

PRAGMATICS AND SEMANTICS OF BELIEF ATTRIBUTION, DE RE AND DE DICTO

My main concern in this talk will be about the relation between pragmatic and semantic elements in an analysis of ascription of belief and other propositional attitudes, with an eye on more general methodological issues concerning pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena.  My discussion will focus on two papers by Saul Kripke, one about the logical relation between de dicto and de re belief sentences (sentences of the form, ‘x believes that a is F’ and sentences of the form ‘x believes of a that it is F’ or ‘x believes a to be F’) and one that raises, but does not solve, a puzzle about de dicto beliefs about particular individuals.

On 11/10 at 1pm in Bousfield A101-A, Xuetong Yuan will lead us in a discussion of Mandelkern and Dorst 2022 “Assertion is Weak.”

On Thursday 11/3 at 1:00pm in Bousfield A101-A, Yusuke Yagi will present Kuhn 2021 ‘The dynamics of negative concord.’

The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature a talk on language semantics by Salvatore Florio, Stewart Shapiro, and Eric Snyder on Friday, September 16, 11:45am. The talk will be in hybrid form.

Semantics and logic; logic and semantics

It is widely (but not universally) held that logical consequence is determined (at least in part) by the meanings of the logical terminology. One might think that this is an empirical claim that can be tested by the usual methods of linguistic semantics. Yet most philosophers who hold views about logic like this do not engage in empirical research to test the main thesis. Sometimes the thesis is just stated, without argument, and sometimes it is argued for on a priori grounds. Moreover, many linguistic studies of words like “or”, the conditional, and the quantifiers run directly contrary to the thesis in question.

From the other direction, much of the work in linguistic semantics uses logical symbols. For example, it is typical for a semanticist to write a biconditional, in a formal language, whose left hand side has a symbol for the meaning of an expression in natural language and whose right hand side is a formula consisting of lambda-terms and other symbols from standard logic works: quantifiers ∀, ∃ and connectives ¬, →, ∧, ∨, ↔. This enterprise thus seems to presuppose that readers already understand the formal logical symbols, and the semanticist uses this understanding to shed light on the meanings of expressions in natural language. This occurs even if the natural language expressions are natural language terms corresponding to the logical ones: “or”, “not”, “forall”, and the like.

The purpose of this talk is to explore the relation between logic and the practice of empirical semantics, hoping to shed light, in some way, on both enterprises.

Muyi Yang will present a practice of her SALT talk “Singularity and plurality of discourse reference to worlds.”

We will have a meeting this Thursday, April 14 from 12:45 to 1:45 in Oak 338.

Xuetong Yuan will lead a discussion of the paper “Resistance and Resolution: Attentional Dynamics in Discourse” by Bledin and Rawlins, 2020.

Find the paper at the link below.

https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/37/1/43/5734752

 

This week Muyi Yang will lead us in a discussion of “When if or when specify modals” by Jos Tellings.

The meeting is at the usual time: Thursday, April 7 at 12:45-1:45 in Oak 338.

Find the link to the paper below.

http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/38/paper3589.pdf

 

The Logic Colloquium on Friday, April 1, at 2:30pm will feature Niels Skovgaard-Olsen (University of Göttingen) with a talk on Norm Conflicts and Epistemic Modals. The talk will be held online. See the email announcement or contact Stefan Kaufmann for details.