Saturday, November 12, 2022
Dow 100 – Dow Hall, 370 Temple St, New Haven, CT 06511
10:00 – 10:30 Breakfast and Opening remarks
Morning Session
10:30 – 11:00 Keely New, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Title: Associative plurals and the plural pronoun construction
11:00 – 11:30 Ankana Saha, Harvard University
Title: The puzzle of kind reference in Bangla
Abstract: This work deals with the semantics of kind reference and shows that Bangla adds a new dimension to our current understanding of kind-oriented languages and classifiers in these languages. Bangla behaves like a canonical classifier language when it comes to numeral constructions, that is, numerals can only combine with nouns via the interpolation of a classifier. In classifier languages, bare nouns are thought to be kind terms. Kinds come in two forms. One of them is plural kind terms, which are bare nouns in a kind-oriented language like Mandarin, or bare plurals in property-oriented languages like English or Hindi. The behavior of Bangla bare nouns, however, do not pattern with any of these languages. I present new data to argue that Bangla bare nouns are in fact an instantiation of the other type of kind-term, singular kind. On a tightly-connected note, I discuss the Bangla classifier -ra, which has been called a plural marker in the language. I illustrate that the unique distribution and properties of -ra can be accounted for on the singular-kind treatment of Bangla bare nouns, and propose a semantics for it.
11:30 – 12:00 Yuhan Zhang, Harvard University
Title: The puzzle of de re acceptability for definite noun phrases
Abstract: We found inconsistent truth-value judgments about de re readings of definite noun phrases in seminal literature in linguistics and philosophy. We designed three experiments to test the acceptability of de re readings and based on the results, we argue that de re reading is admitted by the grammar but contextual factors, like the availability of a transparent referring noun phrase, can influence the acceptability of the de re meaning.
12:00 – 1:15 Lunch
Afternoon Session I
1:15 – 1:45 Jia Ren, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Title: Mandarin reciprocal constructions and dou-quantification
1:45 – 2:15 Janek Guerrini, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Title: Generic readings of definite plurals in Italian: a reassessment
2:15 – 2:30 Break
Afternoon Session II
2:30 – 3:00 Xuetong Yuan, University of Connecticut
Title: Updating unexpected moves
Abstract: This paper investigates the behaviours of the particle ne in the sentence-final position along with its interactions with different clause types in Mandarin. We present novel data showing that ne marks an unexpected move in both declaratives and interrogatives: in declaratives the speaker believes that the content of the prejacent of ne is not among what the addressee has expected in future discourse. In questions ne marks that the current move is not in the standard flow of a conversation. We propose that ne signals that the speaker believes that the current discourse move she makes is not optimal for the addressee: the speaker chooses to use ne when the discourse agents have conflicting beliefs, or the speaker wants to redirect/reset the conversational goals. The current account provides broader coverage of empirical data, and sheds light on the discourse dynamics on non-canonical/uncooperative conversations.
3:00 – 3:30 Yuyang Liu and Comfort Ahenkorah, Yale University
Title: We want to know, must you answer this question?
Abstract: Dayal (to appear) proposes a three-way split interrogative left periphery, which includes a complementizer phrase (CP), a perspective phrase (PerspP) and a speech act phrase (SAP). In her proposal, CPs do the clause-typing and can be fully subordinated, whereas PerspPs introduce an individual for whom the CP is an active question and can only be “quasi-subordinated” by rogative predicates. Mandarin quasi-subordinated questions marked by ma are proposed to occupy a PerspP (Bhatt & Dayal 2020), where the embedded CP is active for the matrix subject. We show new evidence that in fact, the embedded CP question is active for both the matrix subject and the speaker. Moreover, the addressee is obligated to answer the quasi-subordinated question to the speaker. These phenomena are also discovered cross-linguistically in languages like Akan. In this presentation, we extend Dayal’s semantics of Persp to include the question activeness to the speaker and the obligation of the addressee.
3:30 – 4:00 Giulio Ciferri Muramatsu, University of Connecticut
Title: Different disjunction scope in disjunctive interrogatives
4:00 – 4:15 Break
Afternoon Session III
4:15 – 4:45 Natasha Thalluri, Harvard University
Title: Effects of information structure on word order in Hindi
Abstract: Languages with free word order can alter syntactic configurations in order to reflect information structure. The goal of this study is to understand the impact of information structure on word order in Hindi, which is a mostly head-final language with flexible word order. It has been widely assumed that focus in Hindi is in the immediately preverbal position. However, this focus position is only activated by scrambling, which means there is no narrow focus on the object NP in the default SOV word order. I propose a simple experiment to test the preverbal focus position in Hindi, and to examine whether the Question Under Discussion (QUD) conditions the speaker’s choice of word order.
4:45 – 5:15 Keilah Avery, Yale University
Title: The Pragmatics of Child-directed Praise
Abstract: Child-directed praise can cause very complex, and often counterintuitive, effects on the hearer (Kamins et al., 1999). While most research thus far has examined the paradoxical effects of praise from a psychological perspective, a supplemental linguistic interpretation promises a more comprehensive understanding of the dynamic relationship between praise and important factors like self-esteem and motivation (Corpus et al., 2021). Inflated praise includes an adverb or adjective that expresses a very positive evaluation; it exaggerates a child’s achievements and abilities, which can create unattainable expectations. Even though inflated praise tends to have harmful effects on a child’s intrinsic motivation and self-worth, adults tend to produce more of it when addressing children who already have low self-esteem (Brummelman et al., 2016). Pragmatic theory has the potential to reveal the communicative intentions and motivational processes that precede the production of inflated praise in these conversational contexts.
5:15 — Farewells
SNEWS - Graduate Student Conference 