Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

LING LUNCH 4/26: Moshe Bar-Lev (MIT, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Speaker: Moshe Bar-Lev (MIT, Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Title: Simplification by Inclusion (joint work with Danny Fox)
Date and time: Thursday, April 26, 12:30-1:50pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract: 

Simplification of disjunctive antecedents is a long standing puzzle for variably-strict analyses of conditionals (Lewis, Stalnaker). The main goal of this talk is to provide an account based on a theory of exhausitification involving the notion of Innocent Inclusion (Exh-II, for which we’ve argued on independent grounds in Bar-Lev & Fox 2017).  Our second goal is to discuss various consequences:
    • First, the apparent obligatoriness of simplification can be seen to follow from a more general constraint on the pruning of alternatives. 
    • Second, counterexamples to simplification (where the consequent entails one of the disjuncts in the antecedent, McKay and van Inwagen 1977) are predicted by Exh-II despite the obligatoriness attested elsewhere.
    • Third, we can make sense of the observations made in  Ciardelli et al. (2018), presented in Champollion’s recent MIT colloquium (the different behavior of conditionals with disjunctive antecedents and conditionals that differ minimally in that disjunction is replaced by a semantically equivalent expression involving negation and conjunction). Specifically, the proposal made by Schulz (2018) can be adopted (and in fact somewhat simplified). 
    • Fourth, Exh-II predicts that simplification is not a specific problem for conditionals. We argue that essentially the same problem arises when `most’ has a disjunctive restrictor, and that Exh-II provides an identical account for both cases. This, if correct, is particularly important in that it rules out accounts that make construction-specific assumptions about conditionals.