[PLing] Talk by Moreno Mitrovic, 3.10

[Enrico Flor]

Dear everyone,

we'd like to invite you to a talk by Moreno Mitrović (University of 
Cyprus) that will be given on Tuesday 3.10 at 18:15 in the Seminarraum 3 
in the Linguistics
Department (Sensengasse 3a, first floor).

The title of the talk is: "Conjunctive markers in disjunctive 
expressions". See below for the abstract.

Enrico Flor [and Nina Haslinger, Eva Rosina, Magdalena Roszkowski, Viola
Schmitt]

ABSTRACT: "The spirit of this talk is strongly decompositional and its 
aim to meditate on the idea that natural language conjunction and 
disjunction markers do not incarnate Boolean terms like “⋀” and “⋁”, 
respectively. Drawing from a rich collection of (mostly dead) languages 
(Ancient Anatolian, Homeric Greek, Tocharian, Slavonic, North-East 
Caucasian), I will examine the morphosemantics of XOR (exclusive/strong 
disjunction of the “either...or”-kind) and demonstrate that the 
morphology of the XOR marker does only contain the disjunction marker (I 
will call it κ), as one would expect, but that the XOR-expression also 
contains the conjunction marker (I will call it μ). This exotic fact is 
prima facie contradictory with regard to what we may think of as Boolean 
atoms. In this talk, I try to make sense of how & why five grammatical 
formatives are (derivationally and interpretationally) at play when XOR 
expressions are concerned."