Semantics etc.

The abstract selection for SALT 16 in Tokyo, March 22-24, 2006, is finished. The program is now online.

Tomorrow, I get to saddle one of my hobbyhorses. I am giving a lecture on medieval semantics centering around the Square of Opposition. This is part of MIT’s cool “Independent Activities Period”, during which one of our students, David Hill, has organized a series of talks on Pre-Modern and Early Modern Linguistic Thought.

If you’re nearby, come and join us: Thursday 1/19/06, 1:30pm in Room 32-144.

Update: It was fun. My slides from the talk are available, although they might not be very self-explanatory. I recommend Terry Parson’s article on the square of opposition, if you’re interested. One of these years, I will write up my own thoughts on this.

The 2007 LSA Summer Institute will take place at Stanford University, July 2-27, 2007. In a departure from tradition and following the example of ESSLLI, part of the course line-up will come from proposals that are openly solicited. The Call for Proposals is now on-line. [BTW: I will be part of the committee that evaluates the proposals.]

Danny Fox has a draft version of his new paper “Free Choice and the Theory of Scalar Implicatures”.

This paper will be concerned with the conjunctive interpretation of a family of disjunctive constructions. The relevant conjunctive interpretation, sometimes referred to as a free choice effect (FC) is attested when a disjunctive sentence is embedded under an existential modal operator. I will provide evidence that the relevant generalization extends (with some caveats) to all constructions in which a disjunctive sentence appears under the scope of an existential quantifier, as well as to seemingly unrelated constructions in which conjunction appears under the scope of negation and a universal quantifier.

Alonso-Ovalle (2005), following Kratzer and Shimoyama (2002), has argued that free choice effects should be derived by the system that accounts for Scalar Implicatures (SIs). I will support this argument with the aid of a generalization pertaining to “implicature projection” due to Chierchia (2004). Specifically, I will embed a construction in which a free choice effect arises within a matrix disjunctive sentence. We will see that the relevant free choice effect projects as an implicature.

However, we will also see that deriving a free choice implicature is not a simple matter within standard approaches to implicature computation. More specifically, FC directly contradicts neo-Gricean attempts to deal with Chierchias observation (Sauerland 2004, Spector 2005). In response to this predicament, I will argue for a system that derives SIs within the linguistic system, though in a somewhat different manner from Chierchia (2004). Specifically, I will argue for a covert exhaustivity operator with meaning somewhat akin to that of only (in the spirit of Chierchia (2004), but more directly following suggestions by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984), Krifka (1995), Landman (1998), and van Rooy (2002)). We will see that all of our observations about FC, as well as Chierchias observations about disjunction, follow from a novel (though fairly natural) approach to the meaning of the exhaustivity operator.

It is often claimed that the neo-Gricean account of SIs follows from basic truisms about the nature of communication. However, as is well known, one assumption is crucial, and far from trivial, namely the assumption that Grice’s Maxim of Quantity should be stated with reference to a formally defined set of alternatives. There is clearly no escape from formally defined alternatives. However, if the perspective argued for here is correct, access to these alternatives should be limited to grammar. A quantity maxim which is not contaminated by syntactic stipulations (together with appropriately placed syntactic stipulations, i.e., within grammar) derives better empirical results.