Program – Full list of Presentations
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Or not alternative questions like Are you coming or not? give rise to a so-called ‘cornering effect’ (Biezma 2009), characterized as having two parts. First, or not alternative questions cannot appear discourse-initially. Second, or not alternative questions do not allow for follow-up questions and, as such, constitute a cul de sac discourse strategy. Current analyses derive the two parts of cornering from a common source (Biezma 2009, Biezma & Rawlins 2018), However, recent experimental data show that the two parts of cornering are independent of each other (Bertrama, Meerstens & Romero 2020) : While the second part of cornering –ban on follow-up questions– does not always obtain and rather seems to depend on other properties of discourse applying to questions in general, the first part of cornering –discourse-initial infelicity– is an inherent property of or not questions that steadily sets them apart from other alternative questions. The goal of this talk is to derive the discourse-initial infelicity of or not questions from their intrinsic focus structure and from its effect on discourse trees.
Though children begin to use logical connectives and quantifiers earlier in acquisition, studies in both linguistics and
psychology have documented surprising failures in children’s interpretation of expressions. Early accounts, beginning with Piaget,
ascribed these failures to children’s still burgeoning semantic and conceptual representations, arguing that children acquire ever more
powerful logical resources as they develop and acquire language. But more recent accounts, drawing on a Gricean divide
between semantics and pragmatics, have argued that certain of these failures might not reflect semantic incompetence, but instead changes
in children’s pragmatic reasoning abilities. In this talk, I argue against these two lines of thought, and suggest that a variety of difficulties with logical language that are otherwise difficult to explain by these accounts – e.g., scalar implicature, quantifier spreading, and interpreting disjunction as conjunction – can be explained by an interaction between the “access to alternatives” hypothesis and the use of experimental paradigms that obscure the “question under discussion” in ways that are uniquely disadvantageous to young children.
In classical theories of countability, the minimal elements in the extension of count nouns are atoms, and the material parts of these atoms are not themselves part of the extension of the nouns (cf. Link 1983, Chierchia 1998, 2010 among many others). According to these theories, grammatical atomicity (what counts as an atom for purposes of counting in language) is strongly associated with natural atomicity (what constitutes an individual of the kind described by a noun). Against this view, Rothstein (2010) argues that natural atomicity is neither required nor necessary for grammatical counting. Rothstein (2010) argues that atoms can be contextually defined. That is, count nouns like fence, wall and bouquet denote “different sets of atoms depending on the context of interpretation”. For example, what counts as a wall-atom in a particular context (the four walls of a castle that we can consider as ‘a wall’) might not count as a wall-atom in a different context (the north wall of the castle, which we can also name as ‘a wall’). Empirical facts across languages provide ample evidence that discrete individuals are not necessarily countable (see object mass nouns such as furniture in English) and that nouns that denote substances are not necessarily uncountable (cf. Mathieu 2012, Lima 2014 among many others). Such evidence suggests a dissociation between natural and semantic atomicity. In light of this debate, three questions will be addressed in this talk, based on three experimental studies with Yudja children and adults: how much does the conceptual content of a noun and natural atomicity influence how units of individuation are specified? Are units of individuation grammaticalized in the semantics of nouns? Or are units of individuation contextually/pragmatically specified? I will argue that while natural atomicity may influence what we count, we can count atoms that are contextually specified.
Linguists have long been interested in formally capturing the meaning of modal language and continue to make impressive progress on this front. Much more recently, psychologists have started to gain a better understanding of modal thought in non-linguistic forms (e.g., representations of what might happen, or thoughts about what could have happened but didn’t). I’ll present collaborative work that builds a bridge between the two research programs: dividing the labor that needs to be done by the semantics from the labor that is routinely carried out in a general way by the mind. The result of this integrated approach is a simpler semantics for modal auxiliaries that integrates surprisingly well with the emerging picture of the psychological representation of modality.