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.

We will meet this Thursday 3/31 from 12:45 to 1:45 in Oak 338 to discuss “Counterfactuality and Past” by Kilu von Prince.

Stefan will lead the discussion.  You can find open access to the paper at the link below.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10988-019-09259-6.pdf

Here is an updated schedule of upcoming presentations:

3/31: Stefan Kaufmann leads the discussion of von Prince 2019

4/7: Muyi Yang leads discussion of Tellings 2021 “When if or when Specify Modals”

4/14: OPEN

4/21: OPEN

4/28: Muyi Yang SALT practice talk

The meeting planned for Thursday, March 24, has been cancelled.

The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature Yimei Xiang (Rutgers Linguistics) on Friday, March 11, 2:30-4:00pm. The talk will be held online. For login information, watch the email announcements or contact Stefan Kaufmann.

Relativized Exhaustivity: Mention-Some and Uniqueness

Wh-questions with the modal verb can admit both mention-some (MS) and mention-all (MA) answers. This paper argues that we should treat MS as a grammatical phenomenon, primarily determined by the grammar of the wh-interrogative. I assume that MS and MA answers can be modeled using the same definition of answerhood (Fox 2013) and attribute the MS/MA ambiguity to structural variations within the question nucleus. The variations are: (i) the scope ambiguity of the higher-order wh-trace, and (ii) the absence/presence of an anti-exhaustification operator. However, treating MS answers as complete answers in this way contradicts the widely adopted analysis of uniqueness effects in questions of Dayal 1996, according to which the uniqueness effects of singular which-phrases arise from an exhaustivity presupposition, namely that a question must have a unique exhaustive true answer. To solve this dilemma, I propose that question interpretations presuppose ‘Relativized Exhaustivity’: roughly, the exhaustivity in questions is evaluated relative to the accessible worlds as opposed to the anchor/utterance world. Relativized Exhaustivity preserves the merits of Dayal’s exhaustivity presupposition while permitting MS; moreover, it explains the local-uniqueness effects in modalized singular wh-questions.

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The speaker also has a relevant manuscript on Lingbuzz: https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/005322

On Thursday, March 10 from 12:45 to 1:45 in Oak 338, Eva Gan will lead us in a discussion of perspective shift across modalities, comparing role shift in sign languages with different types of perspective shift in spoken languages.

Eva encourages everyone to read the paper below before the discussion, but says it won’t be necessary to read it to follow along.

Maier, E., & Steinbach, M. (2022). Perspective Shift Across Modalities. Annual Review of Linguistics, 8, pp. 59-76.
Paper may be downloaded at this link: https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031120-021042

We will have a meeting this Thursday, February 24 in Oak 338.  From now on this semester the time for our meeting will be **12:45 to 1:45**.

There will be an option to participate remotely.  Let us know if you would like to and we’ll send you the information.

Jon Gajewski will lead a discussion of Chapter 2 (‘Illocutionary Force’) of Todor Koev’s forthcoming OUP book “Parenthetical Meaning.”

The reading has been distributed to the email list.

On Thursday, February 17, 12:30-1:30pm, Magda Kaufmann will lead the discussion of the paper “Practical Moore Sentences” by Matthew Mandelkern (Noûs 55:39-61). The meeting will be in person in Oak 338.

There will be no meeting of the Meaning Group on Thursday, February 10.

The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature Julian Schlöder (UConn Philosophy) on Friday, February 11, 2:30-4:00pm. The talk will be held online. For login information, watch the email announcements or contact Stefan Kaufmann.

Neo-Pragmatist Truth and Supervaliuationism

Deflationists about truth hold that the function of the truth predicate is to enable us to make certain assertions we could not otherwise make. Pragmatists claim that the utility of negation lies in its role in registering incompatibility. The pragmatist insight about negation has been successfully incorporated into bilateral theories of content, which take the meaning of negation to be inferentially explained in terms of the speech act of rejection. One can implement the deflationist insight in the pragmatist’s theory of content by taking the meaning of the truth predicate to be explained by its inferential relation to assertion. There are two upshots. First, a new diagnosis of the Liar, Revenges and attendant paradoxes: the paradoxes require that truth rules preserve evidence, but they only preserve commitment. Second, one straightforwardly obtains axiomatisations of several supervaluational hierarchies, answering the question of how such theories are to be naturally axiomatised. This is joint work with Luca Incurvati (Amsterdam).