Workshop in Semantics and Philosophy of Language

The workshop will have its last meeting of the year this
Friday (June 13) from 11:00am-1:00pm in the Landahl Center.
Ivano Caponigro (UCSD) will be presenting some of his recent
work (actually joint work with Maria Polinsky from Harvard).
The abstract is below.

Most languages (including English) distinguish between
relative clauses, embedded declarative clauses, and embedded
interrogative clauses in various syntactic ways (e.g.
complementizers, gaps, wh-words, extraction). The syntactic
behavior matches the semantic one, since all these embedded
clauses differ in their meaning as well. In this talk, we
present a language that exhibits a very different pattern.
In Adyghe, a North-West Caucasian language spoken in
southern Russia and some parts of Turkey, the very
same “mystery clause” is used to convey the various meanings
that relative clauses, embedded declaratives, and embedded
interrogatives convey in other languages. We show that (i)
Adyghe’s “mystery clause” is a headless relative clause, and
that (ii) the syntax-semantics mapping in Adyghe can be
accounted for by means of tools that have already been
independently argued for in the grammar (set formation,
concealed questions, polarity operators, etc.). More
generally, Adyghe and its extensive use relative clauses to
convey various meanings show that the syntax-semantics
interface across languages is more varied that it is usually
assumed, but it can still be handled without enriching the
conceptual apparatus of the grammar.

On May 30th from 11:00am-1:00pm in the Landahl Center, Daniel Rothschild (Columbia University) will be giving a talk. The title and abstract are below.

Making Dynamic Semantics Explanatory

Heim’s classic paper “On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions” proposed a replacement of truth-conditional semantics with a dynamic semantics that treats meanings as instructions to update the common ground. Heim showed that this system easily predicts the basic pattern of presupposition projection (the way presuppositions of complex sentences are inherited from the presuppositions of their parts). The classic objection to this program, widely considered definitive, is that the dynamic semantics for binary connectives is stipulative, and other, equally natural treatments fail to make the right predictions about presupposition projection. I give a variation on Heim’s system that is designed to escape this objection.

Our very own Nat Hansen will be presenting this Friday from 11:15am-1:15pm in the Landahl Center. Click on the link below to obtain a copy of the paper.
Radicalism and Rule-Following

Peter Lasersohn’s talk on May 9 will take place from 12:30-2:30pm in the Landahl Linguistics Research Center. See below for the abstract and a copy of the paper.

Quantification and perspective in relativist semantics
Peter Lasersohn, UIUC

A common feature of recent relativist semantic analyses is that they treat sentences as expressing contents which are true or false not only relative to a possible world, but also to some other parameter such as an individual, perspective, epistemic state, or standard of taste. The use of such parameters raises interesting questions for the relation between syntax and semantics — questions which parallel, to some extent, the issues pertaining to the debate about “unarticulated constituents”. If a definite truth value can be assigned to a sentence content only if some particular value for one of these parameters is supplied, must that value be the denotation of some (perhaps hidden) syntactic element of the sentence? Or is it reasonable to treat such parameters purely as indices, with no syntactic correlates? Advocates and critics of relativism have both taken a wide variety of positions on such issues, from claims that a proper use of hidden arguments rather than indices supports a more conventional contextualist semantic theory over a relativist one; to claims that such theories are intertranslatable, and therefore equivalent; to claims that both non-standard indices and relativistically interpreted hidden arguments are necessary; to claims that these non-standard parameters function purely as indices, with no syntactic representation. In this paper I review the arguments for these various positions, attempt a clarification of the issues, and present semantic and syntactic evidence in favor of a relativist semantic analysis in which non-standard parameters are not syntactically represented. A relatively novel feature of this analysis is the use of “index binding” operators, which allow simultaneous modal and objectual quantification.
Quantification and perspective in relativist semantics