Syntax & Semantics Circle

University of California, Santa Cruz

fall 2015

October 2

Hidekazu Tanaka (Okayama University): ”Why (*to)?&ldrquo;

In this talk, I show that the impossible sequence why to in English gets ameliorated when the infinitive marker to is elided. An account is developed that assimilates the observation to a much better known syntactic fact: island repair. To establish this, I will examie two constructions that remain poorly studied in the literature; coordinated wh-infinitives and antecedent contained sluicing.

October 23

CUSP Practice Talks

Hitomi Hirayama (UCSC): Japanese contrastive wa and ignorance inferences

In this talk, I will investigate the Japanese contrastive marker wa with respect to ignorance inferences it can give rise to, pointing out that this particle shows similarities to superlatives like at least. In particular, I propose that the contribution of wa is best captured by using inquisitive semantics (Groenendijk and Roelofsen, 2009). Under this analysis, wa denotes a set of alternatives and makes the hearer pay attention to them in the same way as might does so for possibilities (Ciardelli et al. 2009).

Karl DeVries, Karen Duek, Kelsey Kraus, Deniz Rudin, and Adrian Brasoveanu (members of UCSC's LaLoCo): The semantics of corrections

At first glance, correcting mistakes while speaking seems like purely a performance issue, of little interest to theoretical linguists. We think this phenomenon deserves a second glance.
(1) Anders, uh ..., [Andrew]F broke the window.
We will refer to the portion of the utterance preceding the disfluency as the anchor, and the portion following it as the correction. A first analysis might be that the anchor plays no role in the interpretation of the correction. We argue that this initial assumption deserves to be revisited based on data such as (2) and (3).
(2) Every boy brought, uh ..., [should]F have brought a water bottle.
(3) Every boy brought, uh ..., he [should]F have brought a water bottle.
Prima facie, these utterances might involve partial deletion of the anchor and incorporation of remaining material into the correction: in (2) the anchor's partial VP is deleted and its subject attached to the beginning of the correction; in (3) the subject of the correction must also be deleted so that the correction can receive its proper interpretation relative to every boy. We argue that an account along these lines fails to capture the relation between anchor and correction. First, the anchor influences the focus structure of the correction:
(4) a. ??Every boy brought a book. . . I'm sorry, I mean [should]F have brought a water bottle
b. Every boy brought a book. . . I'm sorry, I mean [should]F have brought [a water bottle]F
As indicated in (1)-(3), focus is obligatory on the locus of the correction. (4) demonstrates that if there are multiple loci of correction, there must be multiple foci. If the anchor were merely cannibalized for spare parts, its content could not influence the focus structure of the correction.
Second, sentences like (3) are subject to the same constraints as telescoping phenomena.(3) has a counterpart in (5), a simplified version of an example from Roberts (1987):
(5) Every boy walked up to the speaker. He shook her hand and returned to his seat.
(6) a. *No boy walked up to the speaker. He shook her hand...
b. *No boy brought, uh, he should have brought a water bottle.
These restrictions are incompatible with a delete-and-copy account of corrections. We provide a dynamic account of correction phenomena that involves full, incremental interpretation of both the anchor and the correction, while crucially distinguishing between the interpretation of an utterance and the contribution of its assertion to the discourse, as in Anderbois et al (2015). In our account, both anchor and correction are fully interpreted, allowing the content of the anchor to play a role in the interpretation of the correction. However, only the correction is asserted. On this view, telescoping becomes possible because the entire utterance is composed via iterated dynamic conjunction, making it possible to interpret singular pronouns in the correction relative to quantifiers in the anchor. The wellformedness of the entire utterance is determined based on a relationship of focus inclusion between the anchor and the correction, namely whether there exists a possible completion of the anchor that is a member of the focus semantic value of the correction.

November 12

Jason Merchant (UChicago): Problems of pride and lust: Nonlocal selection?

Since Aspects, selection or strict subcategorization—both in syntax and morphology--has been restricted to complements or sisters. This fact follows as a theorem from recent formulations of Merge (and from its equivalents in other frameworks). In a theory where roots can select for their complements, the locality of selection can also provide a satisfying account of cross-categorial uniformity of selection (e.g. in "rely on, reliance on, reliant on”). This talk explores a set of data that are problematic for the claim that selection is always local; the data come from categorially nonuniform selection in English, Dutch, German, and Greek (e.g., “to pride oneself on, my pride in, proud of”, as well as historically divergent selectional properties of nominal vs. verbal “lust”), diptotic prepositions in German, and nonlocal contextual allomorphy in the Greek verb. I formulate a mechanism for joint selection, and argue that joint selectors must from a single span: any contiguous set of terminals in an extended projection. I conclude with a discussion an apparent problem from pseudopassives and the systematic nonexistence of pseudomiddles.

December 4

Andreas Walker (Konstanz): High and low readings in counterfactuals

The interpretation of counterfactual conditionals, such as (1), has been shown to depend on a notion of similarity (Lewis 1973): we interpret the conditional in possible worlds that are as similar as possible to the actual world while differing from it in making the antecedent of the conditional true.
(1) If John had owned Platero, he would have been happy.
In this talk, I explore how this similarity relation interacts with the presence of indefinites in the antecedent. It has been argued (van Rooij 2006, Walker & Romero to appear) that there are two readings (which we call high and low)in what are called “counterfactual donkey sentences”, which exhibit the indefinite-pronoun structure of donkey sentences on top of their counterfactuality, such as (2): one in which we interpret the conditional in the most similar world where John owns a donkey, regardless of that donkey's identity, and one in which we have to consider the most similar world for any possible donkey that could be owned by John.
(2) If John had owned a donkey, he would have beaten it.
I will sketch how to derive these two readings in both current major accounts of donkey sentences, dynamic semantics and D-type theory. I will then return to the question of whether this provides a satisfactory explanation of why and when these readings arise and explore a related phenomenon: counterfactuals with disjunctive antecedents show a similar variability in readings (Alonso-Ovalle 2009). This provides a possible avenue towards a pragmatic account of the high/low distinction that generalizes over both indefinites and disjunction.