[PLing] Talks by Magdalena Kaufmann and Maša Močnik, 13/7

Eva Rosina eva.rosina at univie.ac.at
Thu Jul 5 09:00:11 CEST 2018


Dear all, 

we'd like to invite you all for two talks on modal/intensional semantics on Friday next week (July 13th) that will be hosted by our project group. 

Magdalena Kaufmann's talk has the title "Stay strong and we’ll still have a story" and the title of Maša Močnik's talk is "Where Force Matters: Life under Doxastic Attitudes". (see below for abstracts)

We'll start at 3pm. The talks are going to take place in the Seminarraum I (1.Stock/Unterteilung, Stiege 7a) of the German department in the main building of the university. Have a look at our guide to the room since it is quite hard to find: http://www.univie.ac.at/konjunktion/wegbeschreibung.html 


Program:

15.00-16.30: Magdalena Kaufmann (University of Connecticut), "Stay strong and we’ll still have a story"
16.50-18.20: Maša Močnik (MIT), "Where Force Matters: Life under Doxastic Attitudes"


We hope to see you there!

Nina Haslinger, Magdalena Roszkowski, Viola Schmitt, Eva Rosina



___________________________
Abstract Magdalena Kaufmann:
"Stay strong and we’ll still have a story"

The occurrence of imperatives in the first conjunct of conditional
conjunctions, I(mperatives )a(nd )D(eclarative)s like “Take a step
to the left and you’ll fall down the stairs”, constitutes a
notorious puzzle for semantic theories of imperatives. In the previous
literature, IaDs have been adduced as an argument for the ambiguity of
the strings that occur in imperative clauses (Han 2000, Russell 2007),
but also as evidence against a modal (aka “strong”) theory of
imperative clauses (von Fintel & Iatridou 2017). In this talk, I will
revisit some of the arguments and data, and I will propose a novel
semantics for conditional conjunctions that builds crucially on the
prosodic (Krifka 2004, Keshet 2013) properties of conditional
conjunctions, on conditional antecedents as aboutness topics (Ebert,
Ebert, and Hinterwimmer 2014), and on non-truth functional
interpretative properties of “and” (Klinedinst and Rothschild
2015). I will argue that, in combination with general principles
regarding the integration of linguistic material into the discourse,
the resulting theory covers the full variety of conditional
conjunctions, in particular IaDs with imperative first conjuncts
interpreted along the lines of the strong theory I proposed in
Kaufmann 2012, 2016.

__________________________
Abstract Maša Močnik:
"Where Force Matters: Life under Doxastic Attitudes"

There has been much recent interest in the analysis and distribution of embedded epistemic modals (Yalcin 2007, Anand and Hacquard 2013, a.o.). I present novel data using the embedding verb dopuščati (‘to allow for the possibility that’) from Slovenian, analysed as an existential doxastic attitude, and argue for a new analysis of epistemic modals that captures their restricted distribution under doxastic attitudes. In particular, I explain why embedding a universal epistemic modal is typically degraded under dopuščati (the Slovenian version of #I allow for the possibility that it must be raining) and negated doxastics. I build on Mandelkern’s (2018) semantics for epistemic modals and argue for a pragmatic competition story along the lines of Magri (2009, 2011), which is used to explain the oddness of sentences like #Some Italians come from a warm country.











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