Whamit!

Speaker: Aron Hirsch
Title: Covert vs. overt exhaustification and polarity mismatch
Date/Time: Monday, February 24, 12-1:30p
Location: 66-148

When can the answer to a constituent question be interpreted as exhaustive, and when can’t it? This paper establishes a link between exhaustivity and polarity, both for covert exhaustification with exh and overt exhaustification with only. I report two sets of experimental data. Exp. 1 shows that an answer can be parsed with exh only if it and the question match in polarity (following Spector 2005, Uegaki 2013): (1/2a) can be interpreted exhaustively; (1/2b) can only be interpreted as partial answers.

(1) Which of the officers have a beard?
a. (exh) Ryan has a beard.
b. (*exh) Ryan doesn’t have a beard.
c. Only Ryan doesn’t have a beard.

(2) Which of the officers don’t have a beard?
a. (exh) Ryan doesn’t have a beard.
b. (*exh) Ryan does have a beard.
c. Only Ryan does have a beard.

Exp. 2 shows that only has a less restricted distribution than exh, but still shows subtle effects of polarity-sensitivity: only can exhaustify an answer which mismatches the question in polarity, (1/2c), but only if the dialog takes place in the right kind of context. I argue that exh and only both carry a presupposition which requires polarity match. When only occurs with polarity-mismatch, a question of the opposite polarity to the question actually asked is accommodated. I claim that accommodation incurs a cost that economy considerations regulate. Economy differentiates between exh and only, as well as between different contexts with only to predict the full distribution of the operators.

Speaker: Michelle Fullwood
Title: Asymmetric correlations between English verb transitivity and stress
Date/Time: Monday, Feb 24, 5:30p
Location: 32-D831

It is well-known that lexical categories affect phonological behavior (Smith 2011). Perhaps the best-known example is that English disyllabic nouns are likely to be trochaic (94%), while disyllabic verbs are likely to be iambic (69%) (Chomsky & Halle 1968, Kelly & Bock 1988). In this talk, I will show that the asymmetry goes further: English disyllabic intransitive verbs are more likely to be trochaic than transitive verbs, even after controlling for morphological category and syllabic profile. I then explore possible explanations for the asymmetry and sketch a grammar that, based on the influence of prosodic environments, would result in the observed stress patterns.

Speaker: Norvin Richards
Title: Contiguity Theory and Pied-Piping
Date/Time: Tuesday, Feb 25, 1-2p
Location: 32-D461

Cable (2007, 2010) argues, on the basis of data from Tlingit, that wh-questions involve three participants: an interrogative C, a wh-word, and a head Q, which is visible in Tlingit but invisible in English. In Cable’s account, QP standardly dominates the wh-word, and wh-movement is always of QP. The question of how much material pied-pipes under wh-movement, on Cable’s account, is essentially a question about the distribution of QP. Cable offers several conditions and parameters governing the distribution of QP.

I will try to derive Cable’s conditions on the distribution of QP from Contiguity Theory, a series of proposals about the interaction of syntax with phonology that I have been developing in recent work.

Two of our undergraduate Linguistics majors have been selected as two of 32 students selected for MIT’s Burchard Scholars program:  Alyssa Napier (‘16) (who is double-majoring in Linguistics and Chemistry) and Oliva Murton (‘15).   Quoting the Burchard Scholars website: “The Burchard Scholars Program brings together distinguished members of the faculty and promising MIT sophomores and juniors who have demonstrated excellence in some aspect of the humanities, arts, or social sciences. The format is a series of dinner-seminars with discussions on current research topics. A Burchard Scholar can be a major in any department of the Institute.”

While we were trudging through snow, Norvin traveled to UCLA this week, where he gave a colloquium on “Comtiguity and Pied-Piping”.

Time: Thursday, February 27, 5-6:30
Place: 32-D831
Speaker: Leon Bergen
Title: Pragmatic reasoning as semantic inference

A number of recent proposals have used techniques from game theory to formalize Gricean pragmatic reasoning (Franke, 2011; Jäger, 2013). In this talk, I will discuss two phenomena that pose fundamental challenges to game-theoretic accounts of pragmatics. The first are manner implicatures, such as the following contrast (Horn, 1984):

1) a. John started the car.
b. John got the car started.

While both sentences are (plausibly) truth-conditionally equivalent, 1b. receives a marked interpretation due to its more complex form. The second set of phenomena are embedded implicatures which violate Hurford’s constraint (Hurford, 1974; Chierchia, Fox, & Spector, 2009):

2) a. Some of the students passed the test.
b. Some or all of the students passed the test.
c. Some or most of the students passed the test.

Standard game-theoretic models do not have the resources to explain the contrast between 2b. and c., as these sentences differ neither in their semantic content nor in their syntactic complexity. In order to account for these phenomena, I propose a realignment of the division between semantic content and pragmatic content. Under this proposal, the semantic content of an utterance is not fixed independent of pragmatic inference; rather, pragmatic inference partially determines an utterance’s semantic content. This technique, called lexical uncertainty, derives both M-implicatures and the relevant embedded implicatures, and preserves the derivations of more standard implicatures.

Speaker: Hedde Zeijlstra (University of Goettingen) Title: Universal Quantifier NPIs and PPIs: Evidence for a convergent view on the landscape of polarity-sensitive elements Date/Time: Thursday Feb. 27, 12:30-1:45p Location: 32-D461

Most known NPIs and PPIs, such as NPI/PPI quantifiers over individuals (like the any and some-series in English) are existentials/indefinites and never universal quantifiers. No PPI or NPI meaning ‚everybody’ or ‚everything’ has been reported. However, in the domain of modals, the picture seems to be reverse. Most attested NPIs and PPIs are universal quantifiers (cf. Homer t.a., Iatridou & Zeijlstra 2013) . Why have Positive Polarity Items that are universal quantifiers only been attested in the domain of modal auxiliaries and never in the domain of quantifiers over individuals? I first argue that universal quantifier PPIs actually do exist, both in the domain of quantifiers over individuals and in the domain of quantifiers over possible worlds, as is predicted by the Kadman & Landman (1993) – Krifka (1995) – Chierchia (2006. 2013) approach to NPI-hood. However, since the covert exhaustifier that according to Chierchia (2006, 2013) is induced by these PPIs (and responsible for their PPI-hood) can act as an intervener between the PPI and its anti-licenser, universal quantifier PPIs often appear in disguise; their PPI-like behaviour only becomes visible once they morpho-syntactically precede their anti-licenser. A conclusion of this paper is that Dutch iedereen (‚everybody’), opposite to English everybody, is actually a PPI. A second claim made in this paper is that universal quantifier modals that are NPIs are so because they have a lexical requirement that requires some abstract negation to be spelled out elsewhere in the structure (after Postal 2000). The question as to why NPIs that result from this mechanism only surface in the domain of modal auxiliaries and not elsewhere is due to their particular syntactic properties and the way how this lexical/syntactic requirement is acquired. Most discussion on the nature of NPIs and PPIs concerns two questions: (i) why are such elements are sensitive to the polarity of the clauses they appear in; and (ii) what is the range of variation in their licensing contexts? The general conclusion of this talk is that different NPIs/PPIs of different strengths are only superficially similar and that the underlying reasons as to why they are NPIs/PPIs can be quite different: some ill-licensed NPIs/PPIs give rise to contradictory assertions, whereas others violate syntactic or lexical requirements.

Speaker: Coppe van Urk
Title: Intermediate movement is regular movement: Evidence from Dinka
Date/Time: Tuesday, Feb 18, 12-1p (Note special time)
Location: 32-D461

One problem in a derivational view of syntax is how intermediate steps of a successive-cyclic movement are triggered. To deal with this, several authors have suggested that intermediate movement is a special operation, not triggered like regular movement, either because it is not feature-driven or because it happens at a different point in the derivation (e.g. Heck and Mu ̈ller 2000, 2003; Chomsky 2000). This talk brings facts from Dinka (Nilotic; South Sudan) to bear on this issue, a language in which the left periphery interacts morphosyntactically with A ‘-movement in a number of ways. I show that, in these interactions, intermediate movement behaves just like regular movement. In particular, both consistently feed phi-agreement. I argue that this similarity can be captured if terminal and intermediate movement are established in the same way, and are feature-driven (Chomsky 1995; McCloskey 2002; Preminger 2011; Abels 2012).

Speaker: Takashi Morita
Title: Prominence correspondence
Date/Time: Tuesday, Feb 18, 5:30p (Note special date)
Location: 32-D831

Prominent phonological units are likely to appear in metrically prominent positions. For instance, syllables with a more sonorous nucleus tend to constitute the head of a foot, receiving stress (de Lacy, 2002a,b, 2004; Kenstowicz, 1997). Likewise, high-toned syllables, considered more prominent than low- toned ones, tend to be placed in foot-head positions (de Lacy, 2002b).It has been suggested that syllables, just as feet, also contain a metrically prominent position: the first mora of their nucleus by default (Kager, 1993). Syllable-internal metrical prominence gives an explanation for preference of falling diphthongs over rising diphthongs. Given a language with the default falling metrical prominence contour, rising diphthongs in the language cause disagreement between metrical prominence and sonority; sonority rises in the diphthongs while metrical prominence falls in the domain. This is a motivation that syllable-internal metrical prominence also requires sonority to correspond just as in feet. Since sonority is sensitive to metrical prominence in both feet and syllables, tone, whose relation to foot-internal metrical prominence has been reported (de Lacy, 2002b), is also expected to be associated with syllable-internal metrical prominence. The present paper provides detailed evidence from Tokyo Japanese (TJ) for the mora-level correspondence between tone and metrical prominence, and gives an formal analysis of it within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky, 1993/2004). Based on this evidence, we can com- plete the claim that metrical prominence, segmental prominence (or sonority), and tonal prominence must all agree, or at least must not disagree.

Second-year student Aron Hirsch is back from the conference Linguistic Evidence 2014 in Tübingen, where he presented a paper coauthored with Martin Hackl, entitled “Presupposition projection and incremental processing in disjunction”.

There is no Ling-Lunch scheduled for this week.

Please join us in extending our warmest welcomes (and welcome backs) to the visiting members of the department for this term.

Visiting Scholars

• Larissa Aronin (Oranim Academic College of Education, Israel) is working on “developing the novel direction of ‘Multilingualism and Philosophy’” and “will continue philosophical discussion, interpretation and conceptualization of multilingualism in an age of globalization.”
• Toni Borowsky (University of Sydney) works on phonetics and phonology, in particular using evidence from language games.
• Tianshan Dai’s (Shenzhen Polytechnic University) research interests include biolinguistics, philosophy of language, and language acquisition.
• Caroline Heycock (Edinburgh) works on syntax and the syntax-semantics interface, with particular reference to English and the other Germanic languages, and to Japanese. During her stay, Caroline is looking to work on three projects: “reconstruction effects, particularly in relatives; “embedded root phenomena”; and (incipiently) a project on possible connections between syntactic priming and attrition.”
• Fuyin (Thomas) Li (Beihang University), who will arrive in June, has a project entitled “Bridging Cognitive Linguistics and Generative Grammar: Their Philosophical Basis.”
• Tsuyoshi Sugawara (Ube National College of Technology, Japan)　will arrive in April. His research interests include lexical semantics, semantics, and morphology.

Visiting Student

• Alexandra Vydrina (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations, Paris & LLACAN) is a PhD student whose interests include syntax, semantics, fieldwork, endangered languages, and Mande languages. She writes: “The topic of my PhD research is the typologically and theoretically oriented description of the Kakabe language (Mande), a minor language spoken in Guinea which has not been described before.”

Congratulations to 4th-year students Coppe van Urk and Ted Levin, who have each had a paper accepted to the next GLOW Colloquium, to be held this April in Brussels. The GLOW Colloquium will be immediately followed by the first Glow Spring School, at which our very own Norvin Richards will teach a course on Islands (alongside an array of MIT alums also teaching at the Spring school: Hagit Borer (PhD 1981), Philippe Schlenker (PhD 1999) and Charles Yang (Computer Science PhD 2000)).

We are delighted to be able to publicly announce that Roger Schwarzschild will be joining the MIT Linguistics faculty starting this Fall as Professor of Linguistics.

Roger received his PhD from UMass Amherst in 1991. He has taught at Bar-Ilan University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and since 1995 has been a member of the Linguistics faculty at Rutgers. Roger is one of the most creative and brilliant semanticists in the world. He has made profound contributions in many areas, including pluralities, focus, the semantics of indefinites, and most recently measure terms and comparatives. Much of his work is also devoted to the ways in which semantics interacts with other aspects of language, including pragmatics, syntax and phonology. Roger is known as one of the best explainers in the field: a great speaker and dedicated teacher. We consider ourselves lucky beyond words that Roger will be joining us, and look forward to welcoming him to MIT next Fall!

Heartiest congratulations to our colleague Michel DeGraff on his promotion to the rank of Full Professor!!

Fourth-year grad student Wataru Uegaki was at the University of Maryland, College Park over the weekend for their 2nd Philosophy and Linguistics Conference (PHLINC2: Language and Other Minds). Wataru presented on “Emotive Factives and the Semantics of Question-Embedding.”

David Pesetsky and his recent LI monograph on Russian case morphology were featured in an MIT News Office article by Peter Dizikes, Cold case: A linguistic mystery yields clues in Russian.

Michelle Fullwood, Ryo Masuda, and Ted Levin were at the Berkeley Linguistics Society meeting this weekend. Michelle talked about English verb transitivity and stress (Asymmetric Correlations Between English Verb Transitivity and Stress) and Ryo about Chechen and Ingush verb doubling (Revisiting the phonology and morphosyntax of Chechen and Ingush verb doubling). Ryo and Ted gave a joint presentation about case and agreement in Cupeño (Case and Agreement in Cupeño: Morphology Obscures a Simple Syntax).

The presenters report a particularly wet conference with continuous rainfall throughout the three days. With two inches of rainfall in Berkeley and up to 11 inches in the area, the linguists might take credit for bringing relief to the California drought.

Speaker: Wataru Uegaki
Title: Emotive factives and the semantics of question-embedding
Date/Time: Monday, Feb 10, 12:00pm
Room: 66-148

At least since Karttunen (1977), it has been observed that emotive factives such as “surprise”, “amaze” and “annoy” exhibit puzzling embedding behavior. As in (1) below, they embed declaratives and constituent wh-complements, but don’t embed polar questions (PolQs) and alternative questions (AltQs).

(1) a. It is surprising that they served coffee for breakfast. (declarative)
b. It is surprising what they served for breakfast. (constituent question)
c. *It is surprising whether they serve breakfast. (PolQ)
d. *It is surprising whether they served coffee or tea for breakfast. (AltQ)

This fact poses an interesting challenge for the semantics of question-embedding. First of all, since this embedding behavior holds across predicates of similar intuitive semantic class cross-linguistically (e.g., German, French and Japanese), it is desirable if it can be derived from the semantics of these predicates, rather than from idiosyncratic selection restrictions. However, in the standard treatment of question-embedding, where embedded questions are converted to some form of their answer, it is not clear why emotive factives are incompatible with PolQs and AltQs. This is so because there is no semantic anomaly in the predicted truth-conditions of surprise + PolQ/AltQ sentences: ‘x is surprised by the answer of whether p’ or ‘x is surprised by the answer of whether p or q’.

In this talk, I propose a solution to this puzzle employing the independently established distinction between strongly exhaustive and weakly exhaustive readings of questions (Heim 1984; Beck & Rullmann 1999). According to the proposal, a strongly exhaustive reading is ruled out in questions embedded under emotive factives as it would violate a principle similar to Strongest Meaning Hypothesis (Dalrymple et al. 1998). On the other hand, AltQs and PolQs are inherently strongly exhaustive (George 2011, Nicolae 2013), which conflicts with the requirement against strong exhaustivity under the relevant predicates. After giving the detailed account of the embedding behavior of emotive factives, I lay out the general typology of attitude predicates that the proposed view entails, and discuss some open issues.

Phonology Circle will meet on Mondays at 5pm in 32-D831 this semester. Today’s meeting will be an organizational one to plan the schedule. Please contact Michael Kenstowicz if you cannot attend but would like to reserve a date.

There is no Syntax Square meeting this week. Please contact the organizers, Mia Nussbaum and Michelle Yuan, if you would like to present. The following dates are still open: Feb 25, Apr 1, Apr 8, May 6, and May 13.

Speaker: Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete)
Title: Approaching the PCC from German
Date/Time: Thursday Feb. 13, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

“In this talk, I focus on a lesser known/studied case arguably falling under the PCC, namely PCC with weak pronouns, addressing some issues one is confronted with in an attempt to characterize the phenomenon. Based on previous research (Anagnostopoulou 2008), I present evidence that the weak PCC does arise in German, contra Cardinaletti (1999), Haspelmath (2004), under two conditions: (i) The PCC arises only when weak pronouns occur in the Wackernagel position. (ii) In addition, the subject must follow the weak pronoun cluster in order for the effect to become visible. I explore how the weak PCC can be analyzed in German, pointing to some questions concerning a) the relative order of Wackernagel pronouns, and from there to clitics showing the PCC in Romance and to other weak pronouns in Germanic languages and b) the order of the subject relative to the pronouns showing PCC effects.”

The ESSL will be meeting this Thursday at 5:00 PM in the 8th floor seminar room. We will be having an informal discussion of Kent Johnson’s paper “Gold’s Theorem and cognitive science”. The paper and discussion should appeal to anyone with an interest in language acquisition or learnability. The conversation will be most useful if as many people as possible have read the paper, so if you are interested in participating, please use the Stellar website for the ESSL (https://stellar.mit.edu/S/project/hackl-lab/index.html) for access to this paper, as well as Gold’s original paper. If you are unable to access the Stellar site, please contact Erin Olson, ESSL Lab Manager (ekolson@mit.edu) or Martin Hackl (hackl@mit.edu). Dinner will be provided.

Speaker: Elena Anagnostopoulou (University of Crete)
Title: Decomposing adjectival/ stative passives
Time: Friday February 14th, 3:30-5pm
Place: 32-141

This talk argues for a decomposition analysis of different types of adjectival/stative passives in terms of the following domains (Kratzer 1996, Marantz 2001, Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer 2006, forthcoming, Ramchand 2010 and others):

(1) [VoiceP [vP [ResultP ]]]

I focus on the distribution of Voice in adjectival/stative passives. Three views have been expressed in the literature:

a) Adjectival/stative passives never contain Voice (Kratzer 1994, 1996, Embick 2004).

b) Adjectival/stative passives sometimes contain Voice (Anagnostopoulou 2003).

c) Adjectival/stative passives always contain Voice (McIntyre 2013, Bruening to appear).

The diagnostics I employ for Voice are by-phrases, instruments, agent-oriented and manner adverbs and crucially not the Disjointness Restriction (Kratzer 1994 building on Baker, Johnson & Roberts 1989), which is linked to the type of passive hidden in the structure (passive vs. middle; Spathas, Alexiadou & Schäfer 2013, Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Schäfer, forthcoming).

On the basis of these diagnostics, I argue that stative passives may contain Voice in all languages under investigation, and parametrization in the properties of Voice should be traced to the nature of the underlying event: specific event (Greek, Russian, Swedish; Anagnostopoulou 2003, Paslawska & von Stechow 2003, Larsson 2009) or event kind (English, German; Gehrke 2011).

I furthermore argue that Kratzer’s (2000) resultant state vs. target state dichotomy is important for understanding the distribution of Voice and, more generally, for understanding the properties and architecture of stative passives within and across languages. The stativizing morpheme may embed Voice only in resultant state adjectival passives and not in target state adjectival passives (Anagnostopoulou 2003). In target state adjectival passives, Voice, when present, is necessarily external to the stativized vP. I present evidence from verb classes in favor of the claim that target state passives systematically lack Voice and offer a potential reason for why Voice is absent in target state passives based on a phenomenon of coercion of participles formed by manner verbs from resultant-/manner to target-state/result readings. This phenomenon has implications for our understanding of “manners”, “results” and the “manner-result complementarity hypothesis” (Rappaport Hovav & Levin 1998, 2008 and related literature).

The colloquium series talks are held on Fridays at 3:30pm. Please check the Colloquium webpage for any updates.

February 7: Raj Singh, Carleton
February 14: Elena Anagnostopoulou, University of Crete
March 14: Marcel den Dikken, CUNY
March 27: Sharon Inkelas, UC Berkeley
April 4: Adamantios Gafos, Haskins Laboratories, Universität Potsdam
April 25: Richard Kayne, NYU
May 2: Matthew Gordon, UCSB
May 9: Julie Legate, UPenn

24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory
Kai von Fintel & Irene Heim
MW 10-11.30 (56-180)
https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp14/24.954/

This intermediate level class will explore basic concepts and tools in five areas of linguistic pragmatics:

1. presuppositions
2. implicatures
3. indexicality
4. focus
5. speech acts, discourse dynamics

Throughout, we will provide pointers to current work on these topics.

The class presupposes familiarity with compositional intensional semantics, as developed in our introductory sequence (24.970, 24.973).

Students who take the class for credit are expected to attend class diligently, to do all required advance readings, to participate vigorously in class discussion, to submit occasionally assigned homework exercises, and to submit a final term paper on a topic related to the class.

24.943 Syntax of a Language (Family)
Noah Constant
W 12-3 32-D461

This course explores a range of topics at the syntax/semantics interface within the Chinese language family, with special attention to Mandarin. Topics include:

- classifiers and structure of NP
- positioning of nominal modifiers
- quantification and scope-rigidity
- topics and topic-prominence
- focus constructions and clefts
- yes-no and alternative questions
- sentence-final particles

Participants will give in-class presentations of one or more assigned readings, and will write a short final paper.

24.964 Topics in Phonology: Stress with Feet
Donca Steriade
Thursday 2-5, 32D-831
https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp14/24.964/

The full syllabus is available here (pdf).

The main goal of this class is to explore the uses of metrical constituent structure in the analysis of stress. The recent literature on stress reports overgeneration and undergeneration problems posed by existing foot-based constraints, and seeks to remedy them by adding more foot types and more foot-based constraints. Most of this work, with Kager’s 2012 exception, has not experimented with foot-free solutions. We will consider giving such alternatives a try. In the last two sessions we will apply what we have learned to the analysis of some complex metrical systems.

The course opens with a 4-week unit on background issues: how we can tell where stress is, important in light of how poor stress records occasionally are (deLacy 2012); whether stress is more than the sum of its acoustic correlates; and the early history of metrical analyses, including the debates between feet and grid-only analyses, which have set the stage for current research.

Syntax Square will continue at its regularly scheduled time on Tuesdays 1-2pm in 32-D461. The organizers for the term are Mia Nussbaum and Michelle Yuan. The following dates are open for presentaton: Feb 11, 25, Mar 18, Apr 1, 8, May 6 and 13. Please contact the organizers to claim a date.

Instructor: Martin Rohrmeier

Lecture:  MW2-3.30  (4-152)

Information:

During the past decade the field of music cognition witnessed a substantial growth and has become a major interdisciplinary research area bridging musicology and the cognitive sciences. This course focuses on a number of selected topics that featured prominently in recent and ongoing cognitive debates. The class will cover an introduction of the history of music cognition, cognitive research in music perception, processing, learning and representation. It further emphasizes the relationship between music theory, music psychology and computational models of music. Finally, recent debates concerning the cognitive overlap between music and language as well as the role of music in human evolution will be covered.

This course is intended for undergraduate and graduate students with musical experience.

Prerequisites: Basic experience in instrumental playing and score reading
Basic knowledge of music theory and harmony
Foundations of scientific and psychological research methods
(optional) background in computer science for computational term projects

LFRG will be kicking off the semester with an organizational meeting in the 8th floor conference room on Thursday, February 6 at 5 PM.

Ling-Lunch, the weekly informal talk series for all linguistics topics will be held at its usual time and location (Thursdays 12:30pm, 32-D461) this semester. The first talk is scheduled for this week and will be by Danny Fox. The organizers are Juliet Stanton and Athulya Aravind. Please contact them to reserve a presentaton spot — they report that the following dates are still open: Feb 20, 27, Mar 6, 13, Apr 10, 17, 24, May 1, 8, and 15.

Speaker: Danny Fox　(The Hebrew University of Jerusalem　/ MIT)
Title: Extraposition and scope: evidence for deeply embedded late merge
Date/Time: Thursday, Feb 6, 12:30-1:45p
Location: 32-D461

In this talk I will address various puzzles that pertain to the syntactic and semantic representations associated with ‘extraposition from NP’. I will argue for a resolution of these puzzles based on the assumption that “late merge” (of the sort postulated by Lebeaux and further motivated by Fox and Nissenbaum) can apply in deeply embedded positions.

Speaker: Raj Singh (Carleton)
Title: Implicature and free-choice signatures: embedding, processing complexity, and child development
Time: Friday February 7th, 3:30-5pm
Place: 32-141

Scalar implicatures are inferences that strengthen what is sometimes called the “basic meaning” of the sentence:

(1) John ate some of the cookies

(1a) Basic Meaning: that John ate some, possibly all, of the cookies

(1b) Scalar Implicature: that John did not eat all of the cookies

(1c) Strengthened Meaning: that John ate some but not all of the cookies (BM + SI)

This strengthening has been shown to generate various detectable “signatures,” some of which are highlighted in (2):

(2) SI Signatures

(2a) SIs tend to disappear in DE environments (e.g., the restrictor of “every”).

(2b) SIs are detectable, but not very robust, in non-DE environments (e.g., the scope of “every”).

(2c) SIs are processed slow: (1a) is processed faster than (1c) (cf. Bott & Noveck, 2004; and much work since).

(2d) SIs show up late in acquisition: There is a stage of development at which children behave as if they assign (1a) to (1) but do not assign (1c) to (1) (cf. Noveck, 2001; and much work since).

So-called “free-choice” inferences, exemplified in (3), have been shown to also disappear in negative environments. Taking this to be one of the signatures of an SI (cf. (2a)), it has been argued that free-choice inferences should be derived in the cognitive system that computes SIs (e.g.,Kratzer & Shimoyama, 2002; Schulz, 2005; Alonso-Ovalle, 2005).

(3) John may eat the cookies or the pie

(3a) Basic Meaning: that John is allowed to eat one, and possibly both, of the cookies and the pie

(3b) Free-Choice: that John is allowed to eat the cookies and he is allowed to eat the pie

In stark contrast with the SI in (1), however, free-choice (3b) is not processed slower than (3)’s basic meaning (3a) (cf. (2c); Chemla & Bott, 2014), and free-choice (3b) is preferred to the basic meaning (3a) in positive embeddings, such as in the nuclear scope of “every” (cf. (2b); Chemla, 2009).

In this talk, I present evidence that free-choice and SIs also have diverging developmental signatures (cf. (2d)). Specifically, I present evidence that children (3;9-6;4, M = 4;11) compute conjunctive free-choice SIs for disjunctive sentences (reporting on joint work with Ken Wexler, Andrea Astle, Deepthi Kamawar, and Danny Fox). Our finding replicates earlier results showing that children often interpret disjunctions as if they were conjunctions (Paris, 1973; Braine and Rumain, 1981), and extends this to embedding in the scope of “every.” We argue that this conjunctive SI follows from: (i) Katzir’s (2007) theory of alternatives in the steady state, (ii) the assumption that children differ from adults by not accessing the lexicon when generating alternatives, and (iii) Fox’s (2007) mechanism for free-choice computation in the steady state. We further provide evidence that children at this stage of development share the adult preference for free-choice SIs in matrix and embedded positions.

These data raise the challenge of explaining why free-choice and SIs both disappear in negative environments but differ with respect respect to developmental trajectories, embeddability, and processing complexity (see Chemla & Singh, 2014 for generalizations to other scalar items). I will explore strategies for addressing this challenge.

24.979 Topics in Semantics: The Linguistics of the Conversational Scoreboard
Kai von Fintel, Sabine Iatridou, Justin Khoo
Fridays 12-3, 32D-461
https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/24/sp14/24.979/

Short abstract: “Wait till you hear what Kai, Sabine, and Justin are learning about discourse and language. You won’t believe what happens next.”

There are linguistic phenomena (discourse particles, evidentials, speaker comments, sentence mood (?) etc.) that do not appear to contribute to the standard truth-conditional denotation of sentences but rather seem to be involved in the pragmatic deployment of these sentences in an evolving conversation. We’re planning to look at some recent work that tackles these kinds of items. Here is a small sample:

Krifka, Manfred. 2013. Embedding illocutionary acts. to appear in revised form in a volume ed. by Margaret Speas and Tom Roeper, Recursion: Complexity in Cognition, Springer. (pdf)

Yablo, Stephen. 2011. A problem about permission and possibility. In Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic modality. Oxford University Press.

Portner, Paul. 2007. Imperatives and modals. Natural Language Semantics 15(4). 351–383.

Farkas, Donka F. & Kim B. Bruce. 2009. On reacting to assertions and polar questions. Journal of Semantics 27(1). 81–118.

Murray, Sarah E. 2014 (to appear). Varieties of update. Semantics and Pragmatics 7(1). 1–55. (pdf)

Eckardt, Regine. 2014. Speaker commentary items. ms.

Dever, Josh. 2013. The revenge of the semantics-pragmatics distinction. Philosophical Perspectives 27(1). 104–144.

Our plan this semester is to engage with that new literature. We’ll start by talking about some historical and theoretical background. Then, we’ll tackle the new work, reflect on it, and situate it within a framework of big issues, such as “must semantics be dynamic?”. We will look at syntax, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy, whatever is of relevance. This will be an interdisciplinary joyride.

Readings to be announced as we move along. They will be available via Stellar.

Welcome to the spring semester for new and returning members of the department. Whamit!, the departmental newsletter, resumes regular Monday publication this week. The editorial staff consists of Adam Albright, Ryo Masuda, David Pesetsky, Kai von Fintel and new student editor Benjamin Storme, who replaces Michelle Fullwood following her three-year tenure.

To submit items for inclusion in Whamit! please send an email to whamit@mit.edu by Sunday 6 pm. At the beginning of the semester, we’re particularly interested in news about what members of the department did during the winter break.