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Talk of interest on 11/13: Sandra Villata (UConn)

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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.

Meeting on 10/16: Ahmad Jabbar

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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.

Meeting on 09/25: Arregui and Biezma 2016

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The Meaning Group will meet on Friday, September 25, 2020, 3-4pm. Teru Mizuno will be leading the discussion on the paper “Discourse Rationality and the Counterfactuality Implicature in Backtracking Conditionals” by Ana Arregui and María Biezma (in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 20, pages 91-108).

The meeting will be held online via video conference. Details are given in the email announcement and can be obtained by contacting the organizers.

Meeting on 04/24: Tomioka 2003

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We are meeting on Friday, April 24, 12:30-1:30pm. Teru will lead the discussion about “The semantics of Japanese null pronouns and its cross-linguistic implications” by Satoshi Tomioka.

We will hold the meeting via video conference, using Blackboard Collaborate. For the link to access the session, please refer to the Meaning Group email.

Meeting on 04/17: Anand & Toosarvandani 2019

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We are meeting on Friday, April 17, 12:30-1:30pm. Xuetong will lead the discussion about “Now and then: Perspectives on positional variance in temporal demonstratives” by Pranav Anand and Maziar Toosarvandani (Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 2019).

We will hold the meeting via video conference, using Blackboard Collaborate. For the link to access the session, please refer to the Meaning Group email.