Syntax & Semantics Circle

University of California, Santa Cruz

winter 2014

March 7

Ryan Bochnak: "Degree achievements in a degree-less language"

Semantic analyses of degree achievement verbs like "to widen" and "to cool" take as their starting point the fact that they are derived from gradable adjectives (Dowty 1979; Hay et al. 1999; Kennedy & Levin 2008). In this talk, I explore the interpretation of inchoative change of state verbs derived from gradable predicates in Washo (Hokan/isolate). Importantly, gradable predicates in this language have previously been argued not to lexicalize measure functions, unlike those in English (Bochnak 2013). The questions I seek to address in this talk are the following: (1) Do "degree achievement" verbs in Washo display the same range of interpretations as their English counterparts? (2) Can these interpretations be accounted for without recourse to measure functions and degrees, maintaining a degree-less analysis for gradable predicates? (3) What do the results tell us about the role of degrees and measure functions in gradable adjectives and degree achievement verbs cross-linguistically?

February 28

Maziar Toosarvandani: "The temporal interpretation of clause chaining in Northern Paiute"

Languages have a variety of grammatical resources for conveying information about time, including tense and temporal adverbs. Northern Paiute—a Uto-Aztecan language of the western United States—frequently uses clause chaining to express temporal relations between clauses, which in English are conveyed by the subordinators "after" or "while". Building on earlier work in which I argue that clause chaining in Northern Paiute has an underlying coordination structure, I propose that their temporal interpretation arises, in part, through the compositional interaction between conjunction and aspect morphology. This aspectual contribution of clause chaining also affects how it is interpreted in the temporal progression of narrative discourse. So in the end, while clause chaining conveys temporal succession or overlap much like the subordinators "after" or "when", it relates to the surrounding discourse in a very different way.

February 21

Manfred Krifka: "Focus in Polarity Questions"

Polarity (or yes/no) questions can contain a focus that influence the way they are answered. Reacting to Did MARY order the beer? simply with no would be insufficient; a proper answer would be No, Bill did. In this talk, I give an account of such questions and their answers in a novel framework for assertive speech acts. I will argue that such questions are not bipolar, in the sense that they ask the addressee to assert one of the propositions {'Mary ordered the beer', ¬'Mary ordered the beer'}. Rather, they are monopolar: They seek to elicit the assertion of one proposition, 'Mary ordered the beer', a discourse move that can be taken up or rejected by the addressee. As always, focus indicates alternatives, which in the case at hand is modelled by a prior request to assert propositions of the form 'x ordered the beer'; if the addressee rejects the assertion 'Mary ordered the beer', the addressee is faced with the task to assert one of the remaining propositions. I will argue that a purely semantic representation of such questions does not result in a sufficient analysis. Time permitting, I will also show how question tags and constituent questions can be modeled in this framework.

February 14

Patrick Davidson, Andrew Garrett, Erik Maier, Line Mikkelsen, Clare Sandy, & Ronald Sprouse: "Developing the Karuk Treebank"

As part of our engagement with the Karuk language and language community of northern California, we are developing a large syntactically-annotated corpus of the language. In this talk we discuss the motivation, goals, analytic decisions, implementation, and challenges of this project.

February 7

Adrian Brasoveanu & Jakub Dotlačil: "Sentence-internal same and its quantificational licensors: A new window into the processing of inverse scope"

The talk will discuss the processing of sentence-internal same with four licensors (all, each, every and the) in two orders: licensor+same (surface scope) and same+licensor (inverse scope). We report the results of two self-paced reading studies showing that there is no general effect of surface vs. inverse scope, which we take as an argument for a model-oriented view of the processing cost of inverse scope: the inverse scope of quantifiers seems to be costly because of model structure reanalysis, not because of covert scope operations. The second result is methodological: the psycholinguistic investigation of semantic phenomena like the interaction of quantifiers and sentence-internal readings should always involve a context that prompts a deep enough processing of the target expressions. In one of our two studies, participants read the target sentences after reading a scenario introducing the two sets of entities the quantifier NP and the same NP referred to and they were asked to determine whether the sentence was true or false relative to the background scenario every time. In the other study, the participants read the same sentences without any context and there were fewer follow-up comprehension questions. The relevant effects observed in the study with contexts completely disappeared in the out-of-context study, although the participants in both studies were monitored for their level of attention to the experimental task.

January 10

Pranav Anand: "Attitude Reports, Discourse Reports, and Factivity"

A variety of attitude predicates seem to presuppose that their complement is true, including the cognitive factives (know, discover, realize), which presuppose their propositional complement p, and emotive factives (love, regret, sad), which presuppose both p and the attitude holder's belief in p. It will be shown that, in sharp contrast, no predicate in English that reports a communicative act (e.g., claim, say; argue, explain) is factive. What underlies this systematic gap? Why do we find attitude predicates that express true beliefs, but not true utterances? I will propose that the answer to this question follows from a systematic grammatical distinction between predicates that report the mental states and those that report discourse moves of conversational agents.