[PLing] Chicago-Vienna Workshop on Cmmunication and Coordination: Triinu Eesmaa's second talk

[Max Kölbel]

Dear linguists and philosophers —

This is a reminder that tomorrow afternon at 16h Vienna time, Triinu Eeesma (Vienna) will give the talk she was scheduled to give at the online workshop back in September, but had to cancel due to illness. Zoom information and title/abstract below.

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Wednesday, November 3

9-10.30 (Chicago)/16-17.30 (Vienna)

Triinu Eesmaa, University of Vienna
"Accommodating Felicitous Underspecification"
In this talk, I will take it for granted that there are cases of felicitous underspecification, i.e. cases in which a felicitous utterance of a declarative sentence does not express a unique proposition. Some authors have argued that in order to accommodate such cases, we should drop Propositional Semantics, i.e. the assumption that semantics determines for each sentence-context pair a semantic value which is (or determines) a proposition. I think that felicitous underspecification does not warrant such a structural reconceptualisation of semantics. I propose that instead, we should more carefully consider the relationship that holds between a semantic theory with which a speaker has competence, and an utterance. I will argue that not each felicitous utterance determines a unique context-sentence pair that pertains to the utterance. On my view, cases of felicitous underspecification ought to be conceived of as cases in which there is uncertainty about how exactly the semantic machinery applies. Nevertheless, propositional semantics offers a relatively good explanation of linguistic competence. 



Topic: Chicago-Vienna Workshop on Communication and Coordination
Time: Nov 3, 2021 09:00 AM Central Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting
https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/98613779050?pwd=SVpabkgzT3FUeUM5akFnWG96WFVqQT09

Meeting ID: 986 1377 9050
Passcode: 065108



–––––––––––––––––––––
Max Kölbel

Institut für Philosophie
Universität Wien
Universitätsstraße 7 (NIG)
1010 Wien
Austria

Tel: +43 1 4277 46470

max.koelbel at univie.ac.at