Syntax & Semantics Circle
University of California, Santa Cruz
fall 2016
November 28
Heather Burnett (UCSC): “Signaling Games, Sociolinguistic Variation and the Construction of Style”
In this presentation, I introduce social meaning games (SMGs), which are developed for the analysis of the strategic aspect of sociolinguistic variation (in the sense of Labov 1963, Labov 1966, et seq.). While remarks have been made (eg. Goffman 1970, Dror et al. 2013, Clark 2014) about the potential usefulness of game theory in the analysis of the meaning of variable linguistic phenomena (for example, variable use of the English ING suffix (1)), a general framework uniting variationist sociolinguistics with game theoretic pragmatics has yet to be developed.
(1) I’m working on it ⁓ I’m workin’ on it
I propose that such a unification is possible through the integration of the Third Wave approach to the meaning of sociolinguistic variation (see Eckert 2000, 2008, 2012) with signalling games (Lewis 1969) and a Bayesian approach to speaker–listener reasoning (see Oaksford & Chater 2007 for a review). The combination of signaling games and Bayesian reasoning has previously been argued to be particularly useful in the analysis of a large class of pragmatic phenomena, including scalar implicatures, manner implicatures and context-sensitive reference (see Franke & Jäger 2016 for an overview).
I define the games and then show the predictions of this framework for both linguistic production and interpretation, as exemplified by the modeling of six empirical studies:
Production
1. Labov (1966)’s study of the social stratification of (ING, i.e., –in’ vs. –ing) in New York City.
2. Labov (2012)’s study of President Obama and Sara Palin’s use of ING in formal vs. informal settings.
3. Gratton (2015)’s study of the use of ING by non-binary individuals (those whose gender identity does not respect the male–female binary) in their home vs. a public coffee shop.
Interpretation
4. Campbell-Kibler (2007)’s experimental study of the interpretation of ING in the United States.
5. Podesva et al. (2015)’s experimental study of the interpretation of /t/ release in the speech of 6 American politicians.
6. Levon (2014)’s experimental study of the relationship between gender stereotypes and the interpretation of high/low pitch by men in the UK.
Based on these examples, I argue that SMGs have potential to provide a new, precise understanding of how we use our linguistic resources to communicate information and carve out our place in the social world.
October 28
Sandy Chung (UCSC): “Chamorro causatives at the syntax–prosody interface”
Traditional grammarians observed that inflection generally appears “outside” derivation, a generalization that can be reconstructed in various ways in minimalist syntax (e.g. Rizzi 2016) or Distributed Morphology. Chamorro offers an apparent counterexample to the traditional generalization. Causative verbs in Chamorro are formed by attaching the prefix na’– to a verb or adjective (Gibson 1980, Baker 1985). Curiously, na’– can attach to a verb or adjective that is already inflected for number. If na’– is derivational but number agreement is inflectional, this order of affixes is problematic. One way around the apparent counterexample is to claim, with Anderson (1992) and Durie (1986), that Chamorro number agreement is derivational as opposed to inflectional.
I discuss a different way around the problem that preserves the intuition that Chamorro number agreement is inflectional. My proposal is to analyze the causative ‘prefix’ as a prosodically deficient verb. Chamorro has a very small number of verbs (i.e. malak ‘go to’, fa’ ‘pretend’) which are prosodically deficient. These verbs, even when inflected, cannot serve as phonological words on their own; instead, they must remedy their prosodic deficiency by combining with the phonological word to their immediate right.
This proposal automatically accounts for many distinctive aspects of the morphosyntactic profile of causatives. (Perhaps the most recalcitrant pattern involves morphological case, but even that can be dealt with.) And since the causative na’– is no longer a derivational prefix, but rather the prosodically deficient content of a syntactic verb, the potential threat to the “outside–inside” order of inflection and derivation dissolves. More generally, the analysis reveals one way in which close attention to the syntax–prosody interface can have unexpected morphosyntactic consequences.
October 14
Lavi Wolf (Ben Gurion University): “On Rhetorical and Metalinguistic Questions in English and Hebrew”
This paper offers an analysis of a particular type of rhetorical questions (RQs), the so-called Doubly Marked Interrogative (DMI). This is a type of why-marked RQ with a particularly puzzling form and function described by Khalaily & Doron (2016), who report examples such as (1) in colloquial Modern Hebrew and other Semitic languages.
| (1) | A: | Clean your room! | |||||
| B: | Lama | mi | ata? | ||||
| why | who | you | |||||
| ‘Who are you [to tell me what to do]?’ | |||||||
A DMI consists of a why-question which embeds an additional question Q: [Why Q], yet it is interpreted as a single question, Q. We show that the DMI is not a multiple quesiton and can be distinguished from the corresponding sequence of two questions (Why? Who are you?) phonologically, syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically.
Following Caponigro & Sprouse (2007) (and pace Han 2002), we assume that RQs have the same semantics as Ordinary Questions (OQs). We adopt, for the sake of concreteness, Karttunen (1977)’s semantic analysis of questions. Thus the denotation of the question mi ata ‘Who are you?’ in (1) is:
(2) ⟦Who are you?⟧ = λp.∃x [p = x is the addressee] & p(w0)
The why-question in the DMI is a metalinguistic question, which, similarly to metalinguistic negation (Horn 1985), targets speech acts rather than propositions. While the standard use of why inquires about reasons/justifications for ⟦S⟧, where S is a sentence (3), the metalinguistic use inquires about reasons/justifications for a previous utterance of S by the addressee (4).
(3) ⟦Why S⟧ = λp.∃x [p = x is reason/justification for ⟦S⟧ ] & p(w0)
(4) ⟦Why SAAS⟧ = λp.∃x [p = x is reason/justification for ⟦SAAS⟧ ] & p(w0)
Condition: SAAS describes a previous speech act SA performed by addressee A uttering S.
In the DMI, the metalinguistic why-question is sluiced: [ [ Why SAAS ] Q ]. It does not contribute to the semantic value of the DMI, which is equivalent to its embedded question Q, but rather contributes a condition to the felicity of the DMI: the condition that a positive answer for the why-question presupposes a positive answer for Q.
RQs are distinguished from OQs in their use. Unlike an OQ, which seeks an answer from the addressee, a RQ does not expect such an answer. It has been shown that this effect can be brought upon by an emphatic component inherent to some RQs (Krifka 1995) that have a ‘challenging’ effect. The challenging effect accounts for the negative bias of RQs noted by Sadock (1971, 1974) and Han (2002), i.e. a bias toward a negative answer. This bias is achieved by choosing, from among the relevant alternative questions, the weakest (and least informative) question and marking it as the strongest. The speaker thus lowers the threshold for a positive answer and at the same time conveys that she is certain that the answer would be negative.
DMIs combine the negative bias of ‘challenging’ RQs with the metalinguistic aspect of the embedding question, thus giving rise to the speech act rejection effect for SAAS.
(Joint work with Edit Doron.)
October 3
Klaus von Heusinger (University of Cologne): “Towards a dual-process model of the comprehension of definite and indefinite noun phrases”
In this paper, we argue that the comprehension of definite and indefinite noun phrases is best described within a dual-process model of referent activation. In a first process, a comprehender accesses the concept associated with the noun phrase’s descriptive material while, in a second process, the function of the noun phrase’s article guides the comprehender to select the denoted referent(s). Importantly, definite articles signal that there is a unique element that falls under the previously activated concept. In contrast, indefinite articles signal that there are (potentially) multiple referents for the previously activated concept. The dual-process model proposed here was tested in a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, where the different functions associated with definite and indefinite noun phrases are reflected at the level of a referent’s accessibility to a comprehender.
(Joint work with Andreas Brocher.)