The Meaning Group will meet online on February 26, 1-2pm. Éno Agolli will present his recent work.

Abstract:

Standardly, proper names are taken to be rigid designators, while definite descriptions are taken to be flaccid designators. This is due to the contrast between 1, which is unambiguously false, and 2, which can receive a true (de re) reading.

2. Joe Biden might not have been Joe Biden.
3. The President of the U.S. in 2021 might not have been the President of the U.S. in 2021.

However, the standard story has neglected the full range of data. The modal operators involved in these sentences are plausibly metaphysical. When we turn to epistemic modals, it seems that the equivalent constructions yield unambiguously false readings for both names and definite descriptions:

3. Joe Biden might not be Joe Biden.
4. The President of the U.S. in 2021 might not be the President of the U.S. in 2021.

To complicate the situation, sentences like 5 below show that at least some names cannot be rigid, for if all names were rigid, then the sentence should come out necessarily false, though it isn’t:

5. Elon Musk might be Satoshi Nakamoto, but then (again) Elon musk might not be Satoshi Nakamoto.

In this presentation, I aim to offer a semantic story that accommodates all of these data. One such account exists (Ninan, 2019), but relies heavily on the dynamic semantics account of epistemic modality to yield the right predictions. I attempt a static account instead. The static account I favor requires two-dimensional semantics, but the true innovation consists in re-imagining how variables work in the semantic framework. I argue that the right predictions are delivered on the assumption that variables do not range over individuals, but rather over two dimensional individual concepts. Questions are raised as to the philosophical consequences of this formal move, quantification, and singular terms under iterated modalities.

Zoom information will be sent by email and can be obtained from Stefan Kaufmann.

The Meaning Group will meet online on February 26, 1-2pm. Ahmad Jabbar will present his recent work on expressivist communication

Abstract:

At a level of idealization, we communicate with each other to find out what the world is like. Normative sentences (e.g. ‘Tax evasion is wrong’), Expressivists believe, are such that they don’t describe the world. A question (Q1) arises: what purpose does normative talk serve then? It seems like rational activity, and resembles descriptive talk; we assert normative claims, debate about them, etc. Recently, Perez-Carballo and Santorio (2016) have provided an answer to (Q1), which helps build a model of normative communication in analogy with the Stalnakerian model for descriptive communication. I present a few formal challenges for this approach.

Zoom information will be sent by email and can be obtained from Stefan Kaufmann.

The Meaning Group will meet online on Friday, February 12, 1-2pm. Our own Muyi Yang will present her work on Japanese moshi.

Iffy discourse: Japanese moshi in conditionals and nominal topics

The UConn Logic Colloquium will feature Nadine Theiler (UConn Linguistics Department) on Friday, 12/04/2020, at 2pm EST (online).

An Epistemic Bridge for Presupposition Projection in Questions

Semantic presuppositions are certain inferences associated with words or linguistic constructions. For example, if someone tells you that they “recently started doing yoga”, then this presupposes that they didn’t do yoga before.

A problem that has occupied semanticists for decades is how the presuppositions of a complex sentence can be computed from the presuppositions of its parts. Another way of putting this problem is, how do presuppositions project in various environments?

In this talk, I will discuss presupposition projection in one particular linguistic environment, namely in questions, arguing that it should be treated pragmatically. I will motivate a generalized version of Stalnaker’s bridge principle and show that it makes correct predictions for a range of different interrogative forms and different question uses.

Please contact Marcus Rossberg for log-in information.

The Meaning Group will meet online on Friday, November 20, 3-4pm. Maggie Lee will be leading the discussion on the paper “Towards a theory of modal-temporal interaction” by Hotze Rullman and Lisa Matthewson (Language 94, pages 281-331).

The Logic Colloquium will feature Sandra Villata (UConn Departments of Linguistics and Psychological Science) on Friday, 11/13, at 11am (online).

Intermediate grammaticality

Formal theories of grammar and traditional sentence processing models start from the assumption that the grammar is a system of rules. In such a system, only binary outcomes are generated: a sentence is well-formed if it follows the rules of the grammar and ill-formed otherwise. This dichotomous grammatical system faces a critical challenge, namely accounting for the intermediate/gradient modulations observable in experimental measures (e.g., sentences receive gradient acceptability judgments, speakers report a gradient ability to comprehend sentences that deviate from idealized grammatical forms, and various online sentence processing measures yield gradient effects). This challenge is traditionally met by accounting for gradient effects in terms of extra-grammatical factors (e.g., working memory limitations, reanalysis, semantics), which intervene after the syntactic module generates its output. As a test case, in this talk I will focus on a specific kind of violation that is at the core of the linguistic investigation: islands, a family of encapsulated syntactic domains that seem to prohibit the establishment of syntactic dependencies inside of them (Ross 1967). Islands are interesting because, although most linguistic theories treat them as fully ungrammatical and uninterpretable, I will present experimental evidence revealing gradient patterns of acceptability and evidence that some island violations are interpretable. To account for these gradient data, in this talk I explore the consequences of assuming a more flexible rule-based system, where sentential elements can be coerced, under specific circumstances, to play a role that does not fully fit them. In this system, unlike traditional ones, structure formation is forced even under sub-optimal circumstances, which generates semi-grammatical structures in a continuous grammar.

Please contact Marcus Rossberg for log-in information.

The Meaning Group will meet online on Friday, November 6, 3-4pm. Robin Jenkins will be leading the discussion on the paper “The semantics of Turkish numeral constructions” by Yağmur Sağ (in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 22, vol. 2, pp. 307–32).

The Meaning Group will meet online on Friday, October 30, 3-4pm. Nadine Theiler will be leading the discussion on the recent paper “We’ve discovered that projection across conjunction is asymmetric (and it is!) by Matthew Mandelkern, Jérémy Zehr, Jacopo Romoli, and Florian Schwarz (Linguistics and Philosophy 43, pages 473–514).

The Meaning Group will meet online on Friday, October 23, 3-4pm. Muyi Yang will be leading the discussion on the recent paper “Attitudes, aboutness, and fake restricted readings” by Kai von Fintel and Robert Pasternak.

The Meaning Group will meet online on Friday, October 16, 3-4pm. Our own Ahmad Jabbar will present his work on

Knowledge-wh and Intermediate Exhaustivity

In this paper, I consider a puzzle about knowledge-wh ascriptions. While (i) intermediate exhaustive (IE) readings for third person knowledge-wh ascriptions exist (Cremers and Chemla (2016)), (ii) they don’t for first person ones (as first noted by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984)). (i) requires for a theory of question embedding to be able to derive IE readings, and (ii) requires this derivation to be somehow blocked for first person ascriptions. In this paper, I argue against the approaches in the literature, and some possible ones, to solve this puzzle. I conclude that (i) and (ii) cannot be explained by invoking an ambiguity for ‘know’ as in Theiler et al. (2018). Finally, I propose a solution to the puzzle: a relativist semantics for ‘know’ using MacFarlane’s assessment-sensitive framework (2014). [[know]] is construed as a function that takes, inter alia, an information state provided by the context of assessment. The variation in (i) and (ii) is then attributed to the variation in the information state of the agent of the context of assessment. This solution is promising in that not only does this semantics explain the puzzle, it handles much more intricate knowledge-wh ascriptions data. I round off my discussion by considering some objections against my proposal, and considering the possibility of tweaking my semantics to make it trivalent.