PhLing

PhLing: Chris Kennedy & Malte Willer (University of Chicago)

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Date: Friday, May 12, 2017

Time: 1:30-3:30

Location: Kresge 3364

Title: Have you ever been experienced? The evidential basis for subjective judgment

Abstract:

Consider a situation in which our friend Kim presents her two cats with a new brand of cat food. Hoshi, who eats anything, devours the food, but Nikko, who is very picky, takes one sniff and walks away. Observing this behavior, Kim says “This new food is not tasty.” We can report on this episode by uttering either (1a) or (1b), but not (1c). 

(1) a. Kim doesn’t believe the new food is tasty, because Nikko won’t touch it.

b. Kim doesn’t consider the new food tasty, because Nikko won’t touch it.

c. ??Kim doesn’t find the new food tasty, because Nikko won’t touch it.

The difference between (1a-b) and (1c) is that the latter but not the former presupposes that Kim has tasted the food.  This is a special case of a more general requirement associated with “subjective” predicates like ‘tasty’ and ‘beautiful’ that the individual whose judgment provides the basis for claims about whether an object satisfies these predicates must have experience of those features of the object that are relevant to the judgment:  how it tastes, how it looks, etc.  Our goal in this talk is to show that the experience requirement can be derived as an evidential condition on subjective judgments, given a pragmatic model of subjectivity as sensitivity to what Kennedy and Willer (2016) call “counterstances:”  alternative ways of resolving uncertainty about meaning.  

References:

Kennedy, C. and M. Willer. 2016. “Subjective attitudes and counterstance contingency.”  Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 26. 

PhLing: Rachel Rudolph (Berkeley)

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Title: Searching for the Perceptual Source

Date/Time: Friday, April 7, 1:30-3:30

Location: Kresge 3364

Abstract: Some appearance reports specify a “perceptual source” — that is, an individual that must appear a certain way, for the report to be true. For instance, Asudeh and Toivonen (2012) hold that the copy raising sentence (1) requires that Tom himself look a certain way, while the null-subject variant (2) doesn’t require this, and could, for instance, be true in virtue of the state of the kitchen, even if Tom isn’t present.

(1) Tom looks like he’s cooking.

(2) It looks like Tom is cooking.

A number of analyses have been offered for appearance reports like these, making different predictions about when a perceptual source is specified and when not. I will claim, however, that all are unsatisfactory, and this is because they focus solely on matrix-level argument structure. By going through a variety of data, I’ll motivate the sensitivity of the perceptual source interpretation both to the fine-grained semantics of the embedded clause, as well as to the broader conversational context. This, I suggest, follows plausibly from the evidential role of appearance reports; and I’ll consider how some previous analyses might be elaborated to capture this idea.

PhLing: Christopher Vogel (University of Maryland)

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Date: March 10, 2017

Time: 1:30-3:30 pm

Location: Kresge 5531

Title: Externalism’s Vagueness Problem

Abstract:

Many natural language expressions seemingly lead to Sorites paradoxes, in that we can construct a series of claims that make use of, or relate to, a given expression, each of which is intuitively plausible but cannot be mutually true. In this sense, many natural language expressions are vague.  If one accepts that the truth of `Donald is bald’ relates to the number of hairs on Donald’s head, one seems likewise committed to the implausible claim that the loss of a single hair can make someone bald.  But, to deny that baldness pertains to head hair count seems equally implausible.  I’ll argue that problems of this sort are merely apparent, and indeed not a consequence of natural language meanings.  Rather, these difficulties arise for a particular externalist commitment to the relationship between linguistic meaning and truth. That is, the long standing problems pertaining to vagueness are the consequence of a (likewise long standing) semantic theory which holds that the meaning of a linguistic expression determines the truth-conditions for that expression. Alternatively, if we deny that natural language expressions have truth-conditions, many of the problems posed by vagueness do not arise in the first place.  I’ll illustrate how an internalist semantics can account for natural language speaker judgments pertaining to vague expressions without generating Sorites paradoxes.

PhLing: Alexis Wellwood (Northwestern)

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Date: February 17, 2017

Time: 1:30-3:30 pm

Location: Kresge 4354

Title: What do comparatives with plurals mean?

Abstract:

Many authors have explored the syntax and semantics of sentences like (1), and overall their compositional semantic properties seem well-understood. Sentences like (2) have received less attention, and so far nothing approaching a consensus about their meaning exists. Early hypotheses have been judged too strong, or too weak, and recent approaches raise issues of their own. This is puzzling in light of broad agreement about the properties of the critical parts of (2).

(1) The red dot is bigger than the blue dot.

(2) The red dots are bigger than the blue dots.

Some authors have proposed determinate truth conditions for (2), while others have suggested it is somehow indeterminate. I provide experimental evidence that tells against both kinds of proposals, while suggesting considerable variation across (and within) speakers. This raises questions about why (2) has such an enigmatic character.

 

PhLing: Bernhard Nickel (Harvard)

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Date: Friday, February 3

Time: 1:30 – 3:30 pm

Location: Kresge 3364

Title: Generics and Conservativity

Abstract:

Generic sentences, such as “ravens are black” or “tigers have stripes” seem to express a generalization of some sort. This suggests the hypothesis that generics contain an unpronounced quantificational element at LF, gen. However, this hypothesis faces several problems, too, including the apparent failure of conservativity. For example, ”ravens are black” does not seem to be equivalent to “ravens are ravens that are black”. I argue that the apparent failure of conservativity is merely apparent, and that sentences like “ravens are ravens that are black” or “ravens are black ravens” are unacceptable for reasons that are orthogonal to conservativity: semantic interpretation breaks down. This analysis can be extended to deal with some famously troublesome examples for normality-analyses of generics, including “books are paperbacks” and “prime numbers are odd.”