Speaker: Nina Haslinger (ZAS Berlin, MIT)
Title: Pragmatic constraints on morphosyntactic organization: A case study on homogeneity and imprecision
Time: Thursday, March 20th, 12:30pm - 2pm
Location: 32-D461
Abstract:
Across unrelated languages, there is a containment asymmetry between definite plurals and all-type plural universal quantifiers (UQs) — for instance, the surface form all the books contains the plural definite the books, while the reverse asymmetric pattern—a definite-plural structure properly containing a UQ structure—is (to my knowledge) unattested. This cross-linguistic asymmetry led Matthewson (2001), Winter (2001) and others to hypothesize that UQs are associated with “bigger” structures than definite plurals. At first sight, we might try to capture this at the descriptive level by cartographic means, or alternatively by constraining the syntactic category/semantic type correspondence such that nominal quantifiers must take a type e argument (cf. Matthewson 2001).
This talk makes two main points. The first point is to argue that both cartographic and lexical-semantic approaches miss a broader generalization of which the definite/UQ asymmetry is a special case. Recent work in plural semantics (Malamud 2012, Križ 2015, Križ & Spector 2021, Bar-Lev 2020, Feinmann 2020, Guerrini & Wehbe to appear a.o.) has focused on imprecision, a form of semantic underspecification driven by implicit QUDs (cf. Lasersohn’s (1999) “pragmatic slack”), and on truth-value gap phenomena that systematically correlate with imprecision (“homogeneity effects“). I will argue that across seemingly unrelated syntactic categories and semantic types, imprecise expressions correspond to less complex structures than their precise counterparts. Thus, the phenomenon is not specific to the extended NP or to quantifiers with type e arguments.
Given the generalization that imprecision correlates with smaller structures, my second point is to suggest an account of this generalization in pragmatic terms. In the special case of contexts in which the precise and imprecise alternatives make the same truth-conditional contribution, this generalization can be viewed as the result of a trade-off between pragmatic maxims falling under the Gricean category of Manner — one expressing a preference for simpler structures (“Be brief!”) and one expressing a preference for expressions that do not depend on the QUD for their truth conditions (“Be precise!”). I formalize this idea using Katzir’s (2007) notion of structural complexity and Križ & Spector’s (2021) semantics for plural imprecision. Time permitting, I will also try to provide independent support for the proposed constraint interaction, by looking at exceptional cases in which one of the two pragmatic maxims is trivialized.
On the face of it, this kind of Manner-based neo-Gricean reasoning falls short of fully deriving the generalization, since there are many contexts in which imprecise expressions and their precise counterparts are *not* truth-conditionally equivalent, and therefore arguably not expected to be competitors for the purposes of Manner. I propose that, instead of giving up on the pragmatic approach, we should bite the bullet and consider a competition mechanism that applies as soon as two expressions become equivalent under *some values* of contextual parameters such as the QUD, even if these are not the actual values in the utterance context at hand. This would amount to a theory in which Manner-based pragmatic reasoning can sometimes apply “automatically” even if its Gricean preconditions are not met, in the same loose sense in which Quantity-based reasoning applies “automatically” on grammatical theories of implicature.