Syntax & Semantics Circle
University of California, Santa Cruz
winter 2016
March 11
Filippa Lindahl (University of Gothenburg): “Swedish relative clauses: Very weak islands”
The mainland Scandinavian languages allow movement out of relative clauses, a phenomenon known as Relative Clause Extraction (RCE). In this talk, I present results from my ongoing dissertation project. Based on a collection of examples from conversation and radio, I give an overview of the environments in which RCE occurs, and which types of phrases are typically allowed to move out of RCs in Swedish. Most extraction in spontaneous usage consists of topicalization or relativization, but interrogative wh-movement and it-clefting out of RCs are also possible. Adjuncts are usually not extracted, but this is only a tendency; it is possible to extract adjuncts that are contrastive or deictic (denoting a specific point in time, for instance). On the other hand, it is impossible to form why-questions that question an RC-internal reason.
This suggests that Swedish RCs are a type of weak island (cf. Cresti 1995, Szabolcsi 2006, Ruys 2015). But Swedish RCs are even more transparent than well-known weak islands, in that they do not block functional readings of questions. Since Swedish RCs are opaque for certain types of phrases, namely why and certain other adjuncts, we cannot simply say that they are non-islands; but semantic approaches like Cresti 1995 and Ruys 2015 are too restrictive for Swedish, since these are specifically designed to explain why functional readings are blocked. Swedish relative clauses thus show that islands aren’t just strong or weak, but that they can be very weak.
January 8
Deniz Rudin (UCSC): “Decomposing Assertion: Epistemic Possibility and the Pragmatics of Update”
Disagreement over might-claims has been held to be problematic for the standard semantics of epistemic modals (Kratzer 1977, 1981), in which might-p is true iff there is a p-world epistemically accessible from the world of evaluation. If the speaker is making the claim relative to their own accessibility relation, then why can an addressee disagree with a might-claim if they believe its prejacent to be false? When a might-claim is rejected, what’s being rejected is not that the prejacent is epistemically accessible to the speaker, but that the prejacent is epistemically accessible to the rejector. Yalcin (2011) and Swanson (2011) hold that such data invalidate the Kratzerian paradigm; Stephenson (2007), von Fintel & Gillies (2011) and Yanovich (2014) pursue various modifications of the standard Kratzerian semantics to try to account for disagreement data while preserving Kratzer’s insights. I argue that disagreement data are in fact completely unproblematic for the standard Kratzerian semantics if thought about from the perspective of a neo-Stalnakerian formal pragmatics in the vein of Farkas & Bruce (2010), in which an assertion of p comprises a proposal for all interlocutors to commit to p. In a pragmatics in which each interlocutor evaluates the content of an assertion relative to their own information state before deciding whether or not to commit to it, it follows naturally that addressees can disagree with might-claims on the basis of their own epistemic state, regardless of the epistemic state that licensed the assertion in the first place—given the standard Kraterzian semantics for epistemic modality, the pragmatics automatically derives the effects that the accounts above attempt to stipulate into the semantics. I go on to argue that updates with might-claims should not be modeled as intersecting the context set with a set of worlds, and show how non-intersective update conditions for various theories of the semantics of epistemic modality can be derived from the same Stalnakerian formula that derives intersective updates for non-modalized propositions.