[PLing] Talk by Martin Hackl (July 15)

[Viola Schmitt]

Dear all,

our project `Conjunction and disjunction from a typological perpective' 
is happy to announce a talk by Martin Hackl (MIT) with the title 'A 
Null-Theory of Haddock’s Puzzle and its Implications for the Role of 
Presupposition in Reference Resolution' (abstract below this message).

When: July 15 (Monday), 2.30 pm
Where: Seminarraum 8, Linguistics Department, Sensengasse 3a

We hope you'll find the time to attend,

best,

Viola Schmitt + all the other project members



ABSTRACT

A Null-Theory of Haddock’s Puzzle and its Implications for the Role of 
Presupposition in Reference Resolution

Haddock's Puzzle presents a well-known challenge to the canonical 
treatment of definite descriptions according to which their use requires 
contextual uniqueness of the NP-restrictor of the. More specifically, as 
pointed out in Haddock 1987, in a situation with two hats and two 
rabbits, one rabbit in one of the hats while the other rabbit is not 
inside a hat, the definite description in (1), in which a definite DP 
the hat is nested inside a larger definite description is felicitous 
(Haddock 1987). Importantly, the utterance in (2) used as a description 
of the very same scene is not.

(1) The rabbit in the hat is excited.
(2) #The excited rabbit is in the hat.

In this talk, I present a "null-theory" of Haddock's puzzle according to 
which Haddock-definites are situational uniqueness definites (Schwarz 
2009) in order to the shed light on the role of presupposition in 
reference resolution. The central claim motivated by this null-theory 
and empirically supported in a variety of heterogenous test environments 
is the constraint in (3).

(3) Constraint on Reference Resolution:
      Presupposed content of an utterance can be used for identifying the 
extension of referring
      expressions in the utterance, at-issue content cannot.