Time: Saturday, February 10, 2024, 9:30am – 5:45pm
Location: 90 Mt. Auburn St., Cambridge, MA 02138
(contact organizers upon arrival for building access)
General Parking Information
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9:30 – 10:00 Breakfast and Opening remarks
10:00 – 10:30 Yixuan Yan, University of Connecticut
Title: The Role of Relative Tense in Mandarin Counterfactual Reasoning
Abstract: The current study investigates how counterfactuality is derived in Mandarin via relative tenses. In particular, I will focus on how two types of conditional structures: negative conditionals (NCs) (yaobushi “had it not been for”) and conditionals with negators (CNs) (yaoshi…bu… “if…not”), interact with relative tense markers le “[+realization]”, guo “[+experienced]” (Lin 2003), and two negative variants bu “not” and mei “have not” to derive counterfactuality. I will reanalyze the data from Jiang (2000; 2016; 2019) and argue that since Mandarin NC is an obligatory counterfactual inference trigger, it does not require the presence of past tense markers; whereas CN requires the presence of relative tense markers le and guo or negative markers mei associated with past tense to get its counterfactual meaning.
10:30 – 11:00 Anastasia Tsilia, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Title: The future in desire: The case of Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian
Abstract: Colloquial Jakartan Indonesian behaves like a tenseless language, with no tense morphology on the verb stem; the context disambiguates between a present and a past tense interpretation. The future is obligatorily marked by a temporal phrase or bakal `will’. We argue that mau `want’ can be used to mark the future as well, as in the following (see also Copley (2002; 2010), Jeoung (2020)):
(1) Context: We are at a party, but it’s getting late. I need to leave.
Sebernya aku nggak mau, tapi aku mau pulang sekarang ya.
Actually I neg mau but I mau go-home now yes
`I don’t actually want to but I will go home now.’
We call this use of mau the future mau. Future mau can have a purely temporal use, is compatible with inanimate subjects, and with the negation of mau meaning `want’ (also spelled out as pengen). However, future mau cannot be directly negated. It is incompatible with clausemate negation, negative quantifiers, and with the implicit negation triggered by the alternatives of `only’ (Rooth, 1985). Yet, it is compatible with negation and with a negative quantifier in a higher clause. It thus seems that we cannot negate future mau directly, but we can negate the proposition that contains it. We argue that future mau is a Positive Polarity Item (PPI). On top of that, we argue that future mau has an evidential component, and can only be used if there is direct (perceptual) evidence for the future event. We propose that mau as a modal (Sneddon, 2010; Jeoung, 2020) is a specification of the regular future marker bakal `will’ having an additional presupposition that there is direct evidence for the future event. We discuss how future mau’s evidentiality and its PPI-hood could be closely related. Finally, we present some cases where a pragmatic competition arises between mau and bakal, and compare their behaviour with that of about to and will in English. All in all, we show that mau in Indonesian can either quantify over buletic alternatives or simply over accessible worlds like `will’, with its `desire’ component being turned into an evidentiality requirement, eliminating the need for an attitude holder. Indonesian shows that `want’ can synchronically mean `will’, a change which is diachronically attested in many languages (Heine, 2017).
11:00 – 11:30 Romany “Finn” Amber, Yale University
Title: “The draft didn’t save!” a syntactic-semantic investigation of computing-related verbs in English
Abstract: In this talk, I investigate the observation that English computing-related change-of-state predicates cancellably imply a result state, rather than entail it. This gives contrasts like (1-2): (1) is a contradiction whereas (2), for many speakers, is not:
(1) #Katie broke the glass but it didn’t break.
(2) Katie sent the email but it didn’t send.
This has not been discussed in existing literature on English, but similar properties of apparent change-of-state verbs have been noted in other languages, including Mandarin, Hindi and Korean (Martin et al., 2021; Sato, 2020; Singh, 1994; Beavers & Lee, 2020). I present the results of a grammaticality judgement survey, compare the English examples with findings from other languages, and give a syntactic-semantic decomposition to account for them. I adopt a layering approach to causativity (Rappaport Hovav & Levin, 1998; Beavers & Koontz-Garboden, 2020; Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou, & Schäfer, 2015) in a Distributed Morphology framework (Harley, 2012) which assumes event structure maps closely onto verb structure (Rappaport Hovav & Levin, 1996). I conclude that a tripartite verb structure can explain why computing-related predicates have different semantics to other change-of-state verbs, why there are syntactic restrictions on these interpretations, and why they are limited to a restricted set of verbs and contexts.
11:30 – 11:45 Break
11:45 – 12:15 Jacob Kodner, Harvard University
Title: Interpreting Fragment Answers at the vP Level
Abstract: In this talk, I provide a syntax-semantics account of nonsententials, utterances that are structurally less than a sentence but convey full propositions (Progovac 2013). I look at a specific subset of nonsententials, nominal fragment answers. To account for a sizable range of (anti-)connectivity effects between fragment answers and their sentential equivalents, I argue the grammar generates a vP for fragment answers, which is less structure than proposed under the Ellipsis approach in the literature, a TP per Merchant (2005), and more structure than the Nonsentential approach, a DP/NP per Progovac (2013). I show that fragment answers generated as vPs, which undergo PF-deletion, can be straightforwardly interpreted at LF by applying Champollion’s (2015) treatment of event semantics – resulting in a full sentential meaning.
12:15 – 12:45 Andrea Matticchio, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Title: Strong doubt as a neg-raiser
Abstract: The verb “doubt” has received some attention in the literature because of its behavior as a downward-monotonic attitude predicate. Recently, Uegaki (2023) tried to derive its s-selectional properties from its semantics by arguing that “doubt” has a weak meaning that is strengthened to quasi-universal in upward-monotonic environments. I argue that this account is problematic because it fails to predict the inferences that the predicate “doubt” allows and assumes an implausible form of context-dependency. Instead, I propose an account of the meaning of doubt that relies on the interaction of two implicatures, one being neg-raising. This proposal, embedded in the system for exhaustification in Bar-Lev & Fox (2020), also offers new insights into the relation between neg-raising and scalar implicatures.
12:45 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 14:30 Nofar Rimon, Harvard University
Title: Coordination puzzles
Abstract: Coordination structures have received great attention in the literature, especially in the domains of syntax and semantics (Borsley, 2005; Hirsch, 2011; Munn, 1993; Partee & Rooth, 1983; Sag et al., 1985; Winter, 1996; Zhang, 2009; among others). In this talk I will present and discuss part of the long-standing puzzles that coordination structures pose and suggest an account for some of them. Among these puzzles are syntactic and semantic selection, ellipsis, and quantification.
14:30 – 15:00 Jooyoung Lee, Brown University
Title: I’m like, “what is this?”: semantic analysis of demonstrational like
Abstract: Be like quotatives have emerged in the late 1980s and since have become one of the most frequently used methods of enquoting speech in English. Nonetheless, like has not been systematically analyzed in terms of its demonstrational function, which allows it to selectively depict the speech event in terms of its delivery, intonation, or whichever aspect the speaker may choose. In this talk, I present the findings on how demonstrational like interacts with different kinds of predicates and the readings that arise from it. I analyze that demonstrational like licenses two kinds of readings: i) content reading whereby the reading focuses on what is being delivered via quote ii) manner reading whereby the demonstrational like phrase modifies the manner of the action performed by the agent. Adopting Davidson’s (2015) approach to quotations as demonstration and Moltmann’s (2013, 2019) approach to attitude predicates, I examine the semantics of the two readings and the underspecified case of be like. Based on the content-bearing criterion and the analogy between the manner adverbs and demonstrational like phrases, I argue that like phrases work as manner modifiers in principle and that, depending on whether the predicate allows for a null content, the content reading is licensed.
15:00 – 15:30 Richard Luo, Yale University
Title: Probing the existence of degree abstraction in Mandarin BI-comparatives
Abstract: Several arguments that Mandarin does not license degree abstraction have been made in past literature (Krasikova 2008; Beck et al. 2009; Erlewine 2018). More recently, however, there have been proposals that argue in favor of such a degree-quantificational analysis (Gong & Coppock 2021, 2024; Li & Sun 2023). I will examine the diagnostics which have been used as testing grounds for the presence/absence of degree abstraction, presenting data from Mandarin. If on the right track, these new developments may cast further doubt on the existence of the DAP (Beck et al. 2004), suggesting that degree abstraction is in fact universal among languages with degree predicates.
15:30 – 16:00 Seungho Nam and Aarón Sánchez, University of Connecticut
Title: Teasing Apart Practical and Expressive Imperatives: Evidence from Spanish
Abstract: Imperative clauses are usually associated with directive/performative speech acts (practical imperatives). On the other hand, it is well-established in the literature that they can also be used for wishes (expressive imperatives). Semantic approaches have embraced this distinction within a single framework. Specifically, Kaufmann (2012) proposes imperatives as propositions with a necessity modal and accompanying presuppositions. ‘Decisive modality’, as part of the presuppositional meaning, captures the role of a salient decision problem in practical contexts and its absence in expressive ones. However, crosslinguistically consistent compatibility of these two readings in a single semantics has faced little counterevidence. We contend that Spanish imperatives present a striking example of the incompatibility of these two contexts because they are exclusively practical. Several seemingly expressive imperatives, like those with stative verbs or in addressee-less contexts, also gain practical readings with a contextually salient decision problem, while leaving room for further exploration of theoretical considerations.
16:00 – 16:15 Break
16:15 – 16:45 Hee Joong Choi, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Title: Negative polar questions and negative neutralization in Korean
Abstract: Negative Neutralization (NN) is a phenomenon where bare answer particles to a negative polar question does not predict the actual propositional answer. Kramer & Rawlins (2009) take it to be a distinctive feature of (English) Low-Negation Questions (LNQs). However, allegedly-equivalent-to-LNQ Korean counterpart does not show this feature. Instead, it is found in the High-Negation Question (HNQ) counterpart, which is Long-Negation Polar Question (LNPQ). I show that this NN effect is actually derived from a different speech act source, namely Rising Declarative (RD) in Korean, and entertain a possibility that it may be a similar case for English NN effect in LNQs.
16:45 – 17:15 James Lee, Harvard University
Title: Epistemic directness and commitment in Korean evidentials
Abstract: There are various parameters that have been associated with the term evidentiality: evidence source (speaker vs non-speaker), directness (direct vs indirect), certainty or commitment (the degree to which the evidence holder is committed to the truth of the prejacent to the evidential); indirect evidentials are further divided into evidence types (visual, auditory, reported, inferential, etc.) Languages differ in (1) which kinds of evidentials are grammaticalized into “bound morphemes, clitics, … prepositions, preverbs, or particles” (Aikhenvald 2004:11),
(2) whether evidentials are optional or obligatory, (3) which of the parameters are jointly expressible by a single morpheme or lexical item, and (4) how evidentials interact with other grammatical categories such as tense and aspect. Taking an epistemic modal approach (Izvorski 1997, Matthewson et al. 2007, McCready and Ogata 2007, von Fintel and Gillies 2010, Lee 2013, a.o.) as the baseline theory, I explore the interaction between tense markers and the suffix -te in Korean, which expresses that the evidence holder has perceived in the past direct evidence for the truth of its prejacent.
17:15 – 17:45 Squid Tamar-Mattis, Yale University
Title: A model-theoretic account of cross-world sentences
Abstract: A cross-world sentence is a sentence that requires information from more than one world to evaluate, typically because a real person’s name seems to stand in for a fictional individual (“Mark Hamill is a Jedi,” which I term a downward cross-world sentence) or vice versa (“Luke Skywalker is from California,” which I term an upward cross-world sentence). While this phenomenon has been examined from a discourse-analytic perspective (Cook 2017), there is no existing formal semantic analysis in a model-theoretic framework. I claim that cross-world sentences depend on a covert operator of type <<e, <s, t>>, <e, <s, t>>> that I call FICT, which forms upward cross-world sentences by attaching to an NP and forms downward cross-world sentences by attaching to a VP. This analysis accounts for asymmetries between the downward and upward cases in how they deal with coordination and anaphor binding.
17:45 Concluding remarks and farewells
SNEWS - Graduate Student Conference 