Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

Issue of Monday, March 28th, 2022

LF Reading Group 3/30 - Ido Benbaji and Yash Sinha (MIT)

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Speaker: Ido Benbaji and Yash Sinha (MIT)
Title: Counting pairs: the logic of Hindi co-compounds
Time: Wednesday, March 30th, 1pm - 2pm

Abstract:
A noun phrase consisting of a numeral n and a conjunction of two nouns can denote either n or 2n individuals; e.g. ten men and women can refer to a collection of ten people, including both men and women (the mixed reading), or to a collection of ten men and ten women (the doubled reading) (Dalrymple 2004). The doubled reading has been accounted for by positing a mechanism for numeral doubling (semantic or syntactic), by which a numeral preceding conjunction can be interpreted on each of the conjuncts (Champollion 2015, a.o.). We argue that numeral doubling cannot be the only mechanism to generate doubled readings based on the behavior of Hindi co-compounds, which only admit doubled readings with a constrained set of coordinations. We further claim that the co-compounds which give rise to the doubled reading, denote sets of pairs, that are treated by numerals as atomic elements, resulting in a doubled reading.

CreteLing 2022!

The 4th Crete Summer School of Linguistics, or ‘CreteLing’, will take place from July 16 to July 29, 2022 at the University of Crete in Rethymno, Greece.

As in other years, a number of current faculty, as well as current and former students will be involved.

Current MIT faculty Adam Albright, Kai von Fintel, Sabine Iatridou, Shigeru Miyagawa and Norvin Richards will be teaching classes, along with alumni Karlos Arregi, Kyle Johnson, Jonah Katz, Paul Kiparsky, Idan Landau, Pritty Patel-Grosz, Doug Pulleyblank, Philippe Schlenker and Juliet Stanton. They will be joined by many wonderful colleagues from around the world.

Besides the wide range of courses offered across four parallel sessions, the summer school will feature two workshops: ‘Super linguistic dialogues across scientific boundaries’, organized by Pritty Patel-Grosz, and ‘(Covert) Modality’, organized by Tim Stowell and Roumyana Pancheva. 

For more information, as well as the application form, please consult the school’s website: https://linguistics.philology.uoc.gr/cssl22/.