Whamit!

This video is a short overview of the science and data that show why children’s native languages are necessary for learning how to read. In the case of Haiti, Haitian Creole (“Kreyòl”), as the native language of all Haitians, should be the cornerstone of literacy projects.

In the first part of this video, Prof. Stanislas Dehaene at the Collège de France provides an overview of findings from neuroscience about “pillars” in the human brain that help us learn how to read. In the second part of he video, Michel DeGraff analyzes the implications of these findings for Haiti, especially regarding how Haitian children are learning (or not learning) how to read. One conclusion is that Kreyòl is an indispensable tool for learning to read in Haiti, though it is, by and large, not used as such, with most children being taught in a language that they do not know, namely French. Such efforts to teach Haitian children in French are, by and large, unsuccessful—-unsurprisingly so, given the neuroscience that is explained in this video.

Speaker: Benjamin Storme (MIT)
Title: The distribution of R in French and Haitian: evidence for the role of perception
Date: Monday, November 30th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32-D831

The distribution of R in French and Haitian (a French-based creole) is sensitive to the post-R context: R only occurs pre-vocalically and before glides in Haitian, R is subject to deletion in word-final position in fast speech in French. The constraint rankings corresponding to these generalizations are pictured in (1a) and (1b) respectively.

(1)

a. Haitian: *R#, *RC > Max(C) > *RV, *RG

b. French: *R# > Max(C) > *RC, *RV, *RG

In this talk, we test the hypothesis that these rankings have a perceptual basis (see Russell Webb 2010). According to this hypothesis, R is deleted preferentially in contexts where it is less perceptible. We present the results of a perception experiment with French speakers testing whether R is more perceptible pre-vocalically than pre-consonantally (see *RC > Max(C) > *RV in Haitian) and pre-consonantally than word-finally (see *R# > Max(C) > *RC in French).

Speaker: Snejana Iovtcheva (MIT)
Title: Distinguishing ‘non-core’ external possessors from possessor raising in Bulgarian
Date: Tuesday, December 1st
Time: 10:00am-11:00am
Place: 32-D461

Bulgarian has several different ways to convey possessive relation between two nominal phrases: the possessor can be expressed (i) with a DP-internal adjectival possessive pronominal as in (1), (ii) with a Dative clitic as in (2), and (iii) with a na-marked full nominal expression as in (3):

(1) (Az) xaresvam [_DP negov-a-(ta) nov-a naučn-a statij-a]
I like.1SG his -SGf-the new-SGf scientific.SGf article.SGf
‘I like his new scientific article’

(2) (Az) xaresvam [_DP nov-a-*(ta) mu naučn-a statij-a]
I like.1SG new-SGf-the he.DAT scientific.SGf articleSGf.
‘I like his new scientific article’

(3) (Az) xaresvam [_DP nov-a-*(ta) naučn-a statij-a na professor-a]
I like.1SG new-SGf-the scientific.SGf article.SGf of professor.SGm-the
‘I like the professor’s new scientific article’

The main distinction between the adjectival possessive pronominals and the clitic possessor is that the clitic possessors can engage in external possessive structures, whereas adjectival possessors are locally fixed to their head-nouns and cannot appear outside the DP (5):

(4) (Az) mu xaresvam [_DP nov-a-*(ta) naučn-a statij-a]
I he.DAT like.1SG new-SGf-the scientific.SGf articleSGf.
‘I like his new scientific article’

(5) *(Az) neg-ov-a xaresvam [_DP nov-a-(ta) naučn-a statij-a]

The current paper concentrates on the external datival possessors (of the type in (4)) with the aim to distinguish between raised possessors (syntactic movement) and clausal base-generated possessors. That there is a need for this distinction has been already pointed out in a paper by Cinque and Krapova (2009). Their claim, however, is based on the valency frame of the verb and is limited to externally-generated inalienable body part relations. In a first step, the contribution of the current paper is to enlarge the empirical data to include well-accepted external alienable possession and to offer diagnostics, such as (i) possibility to doubly mark the possessor, (ii) possessive relation to indefinite DPs, and (iii) possessive relation to DPs within PPs. As it is shown, the novel data are able to sharpen the contrast between both structures and capture the intuitions of native speakers, thus allowing for informed investigation. With this background, the paper then proceeds to advance a claim that externally-generated possessors arise not due to the verb type and its ability to assign secondary theta roles, but due to the pragmatic context and the degree of ‘affectedness’ in the sense of Bar-Asher Siegel and Boneh (2015)’s ‘Affected Datives’. The current paper proposes that while Bulgarian can independently raise possessor clitic out of the DP into the clausal clitic domain, when ‘affectedness’ is given in the context, functional heads of Pylkkanen’s (2002, 2008) ‘high applicatives’, produce possessive readings that are contextually added to the entire proposition. These applicative (dative) arguments are not only different from ‘core’ dative arguments of verbs (as in give, put, etc.) but are also different from ‘core’ possessive arguments that start their syntactic live within the DP. Clausal idioms with external possessors that lack DP-internal variants and locality effects that show sensitivity to the pragmatic context further substantiate the current claim.

Speaker: Aron Hirsch (MIT)
Title: A case for conjunction reduction — Part II
Time: Thursday, December 3rd, 12:30-1:45 pm
Place: 32-D461

The conjunction operator ‘and’ can apparently conjoin a range of different expressions:

(1) a. [John danced] and [John sang]
b. b. John [hugged] and [pet] the dog.
c. John saw [every student] and [every professor]

A possible starting hypothesis about the semantic analysis of and holds that and makes a parallel contribution to the connective & of propositional logic. If so, ‘and’ must compose with two expressions denoting truth-values. This is consistent with (1a), but incorrectly predicts (1b) and (1c) to be uninterpretable. This talk will focus on examples like (1c), and address the question: what mechanisms does the grammar make available to parse (1c), and do they localize in the syntax or in the semantics?

The semantic approach rests on type-ambiguity: and has a flexible type and so can directly conjoin a range of expressions, including quantificational DPs (‘DP analysis’; e.g. Partee & Rooth 1983). The syntactic approach holds that and in (1c) does not conjoin DPs, but rather larger constituents of type t (‘Conjunction Reduction; CR’; e.g. Ross 1967, Schein 2014).

The goal of the talk is to build a case for CR. Theoretically, I demonstrate that a CR analysis of (1c) “follows for fee” from independently proposed syntactic mechanisms, in particular Johnson’s (1996, 2009) syntax for gapping (Wilder 1994, Schwarz 1998, 1999, 2000). Empirically, I introduce data which CR can account for, but the DP analysis cannot, supporting the theoretical prediction that CR is available. Finally, I discuss empirical arguments for a strengthened conclusion that CR is not only an ‘available’ analysis of apparent DP conjunction, but is the only available analysis.

The MIT/Harvard fieldwork support group will be meeting again this Tuesday, 6-7:30pm, at 32-D831. We will discuss two readings on fieldwork methodology:

Matthewson, L. 2004. On the methodology of semantic fieldwork. IJAL 70: 369-415.

Davis, Gillon, and Matthewson. 2014. How to investigate linguistic diversity: Lessons from the Pacific Northwest. Manuscript.

We are delighted to announce that our distinguished alum Ivona Kučerová (PhD 2007) has been granted tenure at McMaster University! Srdečně gratulujeme k tomuto velkému úspěchu!!

Congratulations to our alum John J. McCarthy (PhD 1979), who has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science! John is Distinguished University Professor, Vice-Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of the Graduate School at UMass Amherst. He is one of the most eminent researchers in phonology, a pioneer in the development of Optimality Theory and renowned for many contributions to multiple areas of linguistics.

Of the now 40 AAAS Fellows in Linguistics and Language Science (Section Z), 13 are alumni of our PhD program. The roster of Fellows also includes three members of our faculty, David Pesetsky (PhD 1982), emeritus professor Wayne O’Neil — and Institute Professor emeritus Noam Chomsky (in the Anthropology Section, since Linguistics did not have a section of its own at the time of his election).

The next meeting of the MIT/Harvard fieldwork support group will take place on Monday, Nov. 23, 6-7pm. Note that this meeting will be at Harvard, in Boylston 303. Masha Polinsky (Harvard) will give a talk on fieldwork methodology and tools.

If you are interested in attending, please email either Michelle (yuanm@mit.edu) or TC (tcchen@mit.edu) to RSVP if you have not done so already!

The Southern New England Workshop in Semantics (SNEWS) is an annual graduate student conference that brings together presenters from six universities: Harvard, MIT, Brown, Yale, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and University of Connecticut. This year, SNEWS took place at Harvard. The following MIT grad students gave talks:

• Naomi Francis(second year): A curious pattern in future-oriented if only conditionals
• Aurore González & Sophie Moracchini (third year): Morphologically complex expressions: analyzing le moindre as superlative + even
• Daniel Margulis (second year): Expletive negation and temporal alternatives in until-clauses
• Paul Marty (fifth year): Syntactic Manner: the case of strong crossover effects

Speaker: Mingqiong (Joan) Luo (Shanghai International Studies University)
Title: Opacity in Standard Chinese Nasal Rhymes – Phonology and Phonetics
Date: Monday, November 23rd
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32D-831

(Click here for abstract)

A three-part interview with Michel DeGraff was published in Woy Magazine.

Speaker: Rafael Abramovitz (MIT)
Title: Morphologically-conditioned restrictions on vowel distribution in Koryak
Date: Monday, November 16th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32-D831

When the morphemes of a language display systematic alternations in vowel quality based on other morphemes present in the same word, we usually consider vowel harmony to be the culprit. Based on the properties of the controllers of harmony, the attested vowel harmony systems can be roughly divided into two types: position-controlled systems and dominant-recessive systems. In both cases, standard analyses from various frameworks account for this phenomenon by appealing to the phonological features (or lack thereof) of the controlling and harmonizing vowels. In this presentation, I will argue that Koryak, a Chukotko-Kamchatkan language of the Russian Far East, displays systematic alternations in the quality of the vowels in its morphemes that are strongly reminiscent of dominant-recessive vowel harmony, but that these alternations cannot be accounted for by only appealing to the featural specifications of the various vowels. I will show that these alternations can only be captured by treating the harmonizing features as a property of morphemes, and will present two possible implementations of this idea, each of which requires the existence of yet-not-well-accepted machinery in either the phonological grammar or the set of post-syntactic operations. In particular, I will suggest that an explanation of the Koryak data requires there to be either constraints on the underlying representations, or a mechanism for percolating morpheme-level diacritics through the syntactic structure at PF.

Speaker: Snejana Iovtcheva (MIT)
Title: Distinguishing ‘non-core’ external possessors from possessor raising in Bulgarian
Date: Tuesday, November 17th
Time: 10:00am-11:00am
Place: 32-D461

Abstract.

Speaker: Itamar Kastner (NYU)
Title: Towards a compositional semantics for reflexives in Hebrew
Time: Tuesday, 11/17, 1-2:30pm
Location: 32-D769

The verbal system of Modern Hebrew consists of seven distinct verbal “templates”: specific morphophonological patterns of affixes and vowels which, on combining with a lexical “root” made up of consonants, result in verbal forms. This kind of non-concatenative morphology obscures the hierarchical arrangement of whichever syntactic, semantic and phonological primitives are involved; the affixes are all fused and superimposed one atop another, in a manner of speaking.

This talk focuses on the hitXaYeZ template (where X-Y-Z are the root consonants), the only one of the seven templates in which reflexive verbs can appear. The question is what is special about the morphosemantic structure of this template and how this structure interacts with the root.

On the one hand, the lexical semantic content of the root constrains the argument structure of the resulting verb (not all verbs in this template are reflexive). On the other hand, there must be something special about the hitXaYeZ template itself since it is the only one of the seven that derives reflexives; this behavior will be cashed out in terms of Voice-related heads in the syntax. I will discuss what this tension can tell us about the grammar of reflexivity, agentivity and unaccusativity crosslinguistically, reviewing a recent approach to the morphosemantics of reflexives in Greek (Spathas et al 2015).

Speaker: Raj Singh & Ida Toivonen (Carleton University)
Title: Distance distributivity and the semantics of indefinite noun phrases
Time: Wednesday, 11/18, 5:30-7 pm
Location: 32-D461

The sentences in (1) are equivalent ways of expressing the meaning that for each boy x, there is a ball y such that x kicked y:

(1a) Each boy kicked a ball
(1b) The boys each kicked a ball
(1c) The boys kicked a ball each

This meaning is transparently expressed in (1a) and (1b), but it is harder to see how to derive this compositionally in (1c) because the distributive marker “each” is far away from “the boys”, hence “distance distributivity”. Previous approaches have approached the problem by analyzing the “each” in (1c) — so-called binominal “each” — as a new kind of operator, either derived from another “each” through type-shifting or by lexical stipulation (see e.g., Zimmermann, 2002; Dotlacil, 2014; Champollion, 2014; Cable, 2014).

We present evidence within and across languages suggesting that this approach misses important empirical generalizations. For example, unlike (1a) and (1b), (1c) becomes ungrammatical if “a” is replaced by anything that’s not an existential quantifier (Safir & Stowell, 1988):

(3a) Each boy kicked {the/no/every/one} ball
(3b) The boys each kicked {the/no/every/one} ball
(3c) The boys kicked {*the/*no/*every/one} ball each

In fact, in some languages (e.g., East Cree, Hungarian), distance distributivity is marked simply by reduplicating the numeral: “the boys kicked one-one ball” (e.g., Farkas, 1997; Junker, 2000).

We also present new experimental evidence from English and Swedish suggesting that participants prefer NPs headed by numerals to NPs headed by the indefinite article as hosts for binominal “each”. That is, although both (4a) and (4b) are acceptable, (4a) is preferred to (4b):

(4a) The boys kicked one ball each
(4b) The boys kicked a ball each

The talk will overview these and other generalizations that come from our experimental data collection as well as from typological studies. We will suggest an approach to distance distributivity that introduces no new semantic operators. Instead, our proposal reuses semantic machinery that has been motivated independently, but has to make stipulations about how these meanings are or are not visible at the surface. Specifically, we will argue that (i) indefinite objects in English can receive an incorporation semantics even though there’s no overt evidence for this (building on Carlson, 2006), (ii) that on their non-incorporated interpretation indefinites denote General Skolem Functions (e.g., Kratzer, 1998; Chierchia, 2001; Winter, 2004; Schlenker, 2006; Steedman, 2012), and (iii) that binominal “each”, like other markers of distance distributivity across languages, is the overt realization of a bound variable inside the Skolem term denoted by the indefinite NP it appears adjacent to on the surface.

Speaker: Idan Landau (Ben-Gurion University)
Title: Hybrid Nouns and Agreement Zones Within DP
Time: Thursday, November 19th, 12:30-1:45 pm
Place: 32-D461

“Hybrid” nouns are known for being able to trigger either syntactic or semantic agreement, the latter typically occurring outside the noun’s projection. We document and discuss a rare example of a Hebrew noun that triggers either syntactic or semantic agreement within the DP. To explain this and other unusual patterns of nominal agreement, we propose a configurational adaptation of the CONCORD-INDEX distinction, originated in Wechsler and Zlatić 2003. Morphologically-rooted (=CONCORD) features are hosted on the noun stem while semantically-rooted (=INDEX) features are hosted on Num, a higher functional head. Depending on where attributive adjectives attach, they may display either type of agreement. The observed and unobserved patterns of agreement follow from general principles of selection and syntactic locality.

Speaker: Susi Wurmbrand (University of Connecticut)
Title: Fake indexicals, feature sharing, and the importance of gendered relatives
Date: Friday, November 20th
Time: 3:30-5:00 PM
Place: 32-141

A popular trend in binding theories is to view binding as a dependency between the bindee and a functional verbal head (v, T, C), rather than a direct dependency between the antecedent DP and the bindee (Reuland 2001, 2005, 2011, Chomsky 2008, Kratzer 2009). In this talk, I will show that binding is not sensitive, nor can it be assumed to be driven or mediated by functional heads. Instead data are provided that argue for a return to the traditional view that binding requires a direct dependency between the antecedent and the bindee/variable. I propose that this dependency is formalized as Reverse Agree (Wurmbrand 2011 et seq.), constrained by a locality condition reminiscent of Rule H (Heim 1993, Fox 1998) and the concept of feature sharing proposed in Pesetsky and Torrego (2007).

The empirical focus of the talk will be bound variable interpretations, in particular (fake) indexical pronouns in four Germanic languages—English, Dutch, German, and Icelandic. In all four languages, bound variable interpretations are available for 1st and 2nd person pronouns in focus constructions such as Only I did my best—in these contexts, the 1st person pronoun my is not interpreted as the speaker in the set of alternatives (no one else did their best), but as a variable, hence the term fake indexicals. Fake indexicals are, however, restricted in relative clauses of the form I am the only one who takes care of my son/(*)who did my best: English and Dutch allow a bound variable interpretation of my in such contexts, whereas German and Icelandic prohibit fake indexicals (my can only be interpreted as referring to the speaker).

Kratzer (2009) proposes a morpho-syntactic spell-out approach for English vs. German, in which the feature sets of the relative pronoun, T, v, and the possessive pronoun unify, leading to conflicting 1st/3rd person feature specifications on T and the possessive pronoun, which leads to a fatal spell-out dilemma in German. In English, on the other hand, markedness rules allow ignoring certain features, and the spell-out dilemma can be resolved in favor of person for the possessive pronoun (my) and in favor of gender for verbs (with gender corresponding to 3rd person). This account does not address why only some languages have such markedness rules, in particular not why Dutch patterns with English and Icelandic with German.

Based on a series of word order differences, I show that the nature of the verbal inflection is irrelevant for the licensing of fake indexicals, but that the crucial factors are: c-command by the antecedent DP, and a locality condition favoring feature sharing with the closest possible binder whenever possible. I argue that the relevant difference between the two language groups lies in the morphological make-up of the head DP of the relative clause (and in German also the relative pronoun): the relative DP shows morphological gender distinctions in the singular in German and Icelandic, but not in English and Dutch. I propose that the lack of gender features allows by-passing the closest binder (the relative DP/pronoun) and long-distance binding by the indexical matrix subject directly, whereas morphologically fully specified relative pronouns/DPs restrict binding to the relative DP. Various consequences supporting this approach will be discussed, among them non-indexical bound variable contexts which show the same locality effect when gender agreement is attempted across a relative pronoun/DP with different morphological features.

As you know, Harvard is hosting this year’s meeting of SNEWS - a semantics workshop that brings together graduate students in Linguistics from 6 schools.

Date: Saturday, November 21, 2015
Talks in: Harvard Yard, Boylston Hall 105

The workshop program is now available on the website. All graduate students, visitors and faculty members are welcome to attend!

Speaker: Laura McPherson (Dartmouth)
Title: Phrasal morphophonology: Dogon tonosyntax and beyond
Date: Monday, November 9th
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32-D831

How do we account for phonological alternations at the phrase level, triggered not by adjacent phonological triggers or phrasing, but instead by specific morphosyntactic elements? Taking Dogon tonosyntax as the main case study, I propose a class of phenomena grouped under the heading “phrasal morphophonology” that can result when phrasal phonology undergoes restructuring. I argue that these phenomena are best accounted for in an extension of Construction Morphology, where the surface changes are phonological idiosyncrasies in lexicalized phrasal constructions. I discuss the diachronic development of phrasal morphophonological systems and suggest that Celtic mutations and French liaison may also fall under this heading.

Speaker: Bruna Karla Pereira (UFVJM; CAPES Foundation - Ministry of Education of Brazil)
Title: Allocutive agreement and the saP in dialectal Brazilian Portuguese
Date: Tuesday, November 10rd
Time: 10:00am-11:00am
Place: 32-D461

Abstract.

Speaker: Juliet Stanton (MIT)
Title: Trigger Deletion in Gurindji
Time: Thursday, November 12th, 12:30-1:45 pm
Place: 32-D461

It is generally accepted in the literature that harmony processes are myopic. For example, a regressive harmony process operating on the string […x y z…], will spread from z to y, without looking ahead to check whether it can spread all the way to x, the end of the domain. Accounting for the apparent absence of non-myopic patterns has led analysts to propose substantial revisions to the architecture of classical OT (e.g. Wilson 2006, McCarthy 2009). In this talk, however, I suggest that a non-myopic, long-distance nasal harmony process is attested in Gurindji (Pama-Nyungan; McConvell 1988). When full application of harmony would lead to an undesirable result, the trigger deletes, preventing harmony from applying altogether. Trigger deletion is predicted by frameworks that permit non-myopic interactions, like parallel OT; the existence of the Gurindji pattern suggests that this is a feature, not a bug.

Speaker: Koji Sugisaki (Mie University)
Title: An Experimental Investigation into Sluicing in Child Japanese
Date and room: Thursday: 5-6:30; 32-D461

Sluicing is one of the best investigated instances of ellipsis in the theoretical literature. Despite its theoretical importance, few studies have examined children’s acquisition of this ellipsis phenomenon. In light of this background, this study investigates experimentally whether Japanese-speaking preschool children are sensitive to the identity condition on sluicing proposed by Merchant (2013), which requires that the sluiced constituent and its antecedent must match in voice (active/passive). If this ban on voice mismatches in sluicing follows from certain principles of UG as the theory claims, it is predicted that the knowledge of this constraint should be in the grammar of preschool children. In order to evaluate this prediction, we conducted an experiment with 21 Japanese-speaking children (mean age 5;07). The results of our experiment, which employed a question-after-story task, suggest that these children are in fact sensitive to the ban on voice mismatches in sluicing proposed by Merchant (2013). This finding would constitute a small but significant step toward understanding when and how children acquire the knowledge of sluicing and its constraints.

Speaker: Maria-Margarita Makri (York)
Title: Not as might
Time: Thursday, November 5th, 12:30-1:45 pm
Place: 32-D461

Abstract.

Whug Whiches in situ,
howλing wolves you can see through,
Bats flying,
Pumpkins crying,
Pathetic rhyming,
But good timing —
Happy Halloween!

To see more pictures, visit the MIT Linguistics Facebook page.

Speaker: Hanzhi Zhu (MIT)
Title: The Syllable Contact Law in Kyrgyz
Date: Tuesday, November 2nd
Time: 5-6:30
Place: 32-D831

Kyrgyz (Turkic) has been described as a language which abides by the Syllable Contact Law by requiring a drop in sonority (Gouskova 2004). For example, /aj+nɨ/ is realized as [ajdɨ], with n desonorizing to d, with *jn having a sonority drop too small to be permitted. Partly motivated by this observation, Gouskova proposes a relational constraint hierarchy based on sonority distance between C1 and C2 alone. However, a closer look at the data leads to a more complicated picture, revealing that an approach based solely on the sonority distance between two segments cannot work. Although glide-nasal (*jn) sequences are prohibited, glide-lateral (jl) sequences are permitted, despite having an even smaller sonority drop. In this talk, I will motivate the need for an alternative account to SyllCon in languages which resolve violations via desonorization.

Speaker: Nico Baier (Berkeley)
Title: Deriving Anti-Agreement in Berber
Date: Tuesday, November 3rd
Time: 10:00am-11:00am
Place: 32-D461

This presentation examines anti-agreement (Ouhalla 1993), an effect whereby the normal agreement pattern with an argument in a specific position is disrupted when that position is Ă-bound, in Berber. I argue that verbal agreement in Berber is pronominal, and that anti-agreement arises from a need to avoid a weak crossover violation that would occur when a subject is Ā-extracted from its base position in Spec-vP. I show that when combined with Erlewine’s (2014) Spec-to-Spec Anti-locality constraint, this theory correctly predicts the distribution of anti-agreement in Berber.

Speaker: Paul Portner (Georgetown University)
Title: Imperative mood
Date: Thursday, November 5th
Time: 5:00-6:30 PM
Place: 32-D461

We usually think about imperatives as one of the major sentence moods, in a paradigm which also includes declaratives and interrogatives. But it is often sometimes described as a verbal mood, in opposition to indicatives and subjunctives. There are clear similarities between imperatives, on the one hand, and subjunctives and infinitives, on the other. For example:

1. Infinitives and imperatives can have controlled subjects when embedded.

2. Infinitives, imperatives and (to a lesser extent) subjunctives lack independent tense.

3. Infinitives, subjunctives, and imperatives are used in similar semantic contexts.

I will begin by presenting a framework in which point 3 can be made precise. This framework, a version of dynamic logic with preferences (Veltman 1986, van der Torre and Tan 1998), allows us to represent the central ideas of one of the major approaches to verbal mood (the Comparison-Based Approach; Giorgi and Pianesi 1997, Villalta 2008, Anand and Hacquard 2013, among others) and one of the major approaches to sentence mood (Dynamic Pragmatics; e.g. Hamblin 1971, Gazdar 1981, Roberts 2012, Portner 2004). This framework allows us to express part of what imperatives have in common with infinitives/subjunctives. Imperatives, infinitives, and subjunctives are used to report or affect which worlds are best-ranked according to a selected ordering relation.

Then we will see that the analysis presented does not seem to cover the relations among imperatives, infinitives, and subjunctives fully. Returning to points 1-2, both of these properties are tied to the semantics of de se attitudes. Specifically, 1 leads to a subject-oriented de se meaning, while 2 leads to temporal de se. It seems that clauses which normally give rise to de se interpretations are selected in contexts of modal comparison. What is the connection between de se meaning and comparison-based modality? Are clauses to which a de se operator has applied especially well-suited for computing comparison-based modal meanings? I leave this as an open puzzle.

Speaker: Paul Portner (Georgetown University)
Title: Commitment to Priorities
Date: Friday, November 6th
Time: 3:30-5:00 PM
Place: 32-141

I will discuss variations in the “strength” of imperatives with the goal of better understanding the representation of priorities in discourse. Imperatives can seem stronger or weaker in several different ways. Sometimes they allow an inference to a strong necessity statement; in other instances, we can infer a weak necessity or a possibility statement:

(1) Soldiers, march! -> They must march.

(2) Have a cookie! -> He #must/should/may have a cookie.

In some cases, they make true to corresponding modal statement; in others, they are justified by it:

(3) Soldiers, march! => They must march.

(4) Have a cookie! <= He should have a cookie.

With some examples, the speaker doesn’t seem to care whether the addressee agrees; with others, the addressee’s choice determines the imperative’s effect:

(5) Sit down, and don’t get up until I tell you to!

(6) Have a seat. You’ll be more comfortable.

Rising or falling intonation often correspond to an imperative’s being strong or weak:

(7) Sit down[v]

(8) Have a seat[^]

Recent theories of imperatives treat them as affecting the relative priority of alternatives compatible with the common ground; relative priority is represented by means of a to-do list, ordering source, or other similar construct (e.g., Portner 2004, Mastop 2005, Charlow 2011, Kaufmann 2012, Condoravdi & Lauer 2012, Starr 2013). In this talk, I argue that, in order to understand the variations in imperative strength, we need to employ a more articulated representation of the discourse context which tracks speaker’s and addressee’s individual commitments concerning the relative priority of alternatives, as well as joint commitments. Specifically, I build on the model of commitment slates (Hamblin 1971) as developed for falling vs. rising declaratives like (9)-(10) and polar interrogatives by Gunlogson (2001) and Farkas & Bruce (2010).

(9) It’s raining[v].

(10) It’s raining[^]?

The central idea is that strong and weak imperatives differ in a way analogous to (9) and (10).