Syntax & Semantics Circle
University of California, Santa Cruz
winter 2015
PAST MEETINGS
February 13
Nick Kalivoda: "The Derivation of Anti-Agreement and Agreement Weakening: Evidence from Zapotec"
February 20
Melissa Fusco: "Deontic Disjunction"
Abstract: I propose a unified semantic solution to two puzzles: Ross's puzzle (the apparent failure of Ought φ to entail Ought (φ or ψ)) and free choice permission (the apparent fact that May(φ or ψ) entails both May φ and May ψ). I begin with a pair of cases from the decision theory literature illustrating the phenomenon of act dependence, where what an agent ought to do depends on what she does. The notion of permissibility distilled from these cases forms the basis for my analysis of May and Ought. This framework is then combined with a generalization of the classical semantics for disjunction—equivalent to Boolean disjunction on the diagonal, but with a different two-dimensional character—that explains the puzzling facts in terms of semantic consequence.
February 27
Three talks by the students of Experimental Methods (Fall 2014) on the results of their studies on island phenomena.