[PLing] Chicago-Vienna Workshop on Communication and Coordination (Online edition)

Wed Sep 22 20:16:54 CEST 2021

Dear linguists and philosophers — 

We are pleased to announce the Chicago-Vienna Workshop on Communication and Coordination.  This project, funded by the Chicago-Vienna Faculty Grants Program, will bring together linguists and philosophers at the University of Chicago and University of Vienna for a conference on communication and coordination at the University of Chicago.  The conference was originally planned for September 2020 … and then September 2021 … but it has been delayed due to pandemic-related difficulties in organizing international travel.  We are currently working towards an in-person conference in Chicago in May 2022, but in the meantime, we are pleased to announce three online talks next Wednesday and Thursday from two of the graduate students participants, Triinu Eesmaa (Vienna) and Mike Tabatowski (Chicago).  Times, titles and abstracts are below, as well as a zoom link.  All are welcome to attend.

Wednesday, September 29

9.00-10.25 (Chicago)/16-17.25 (Vienna)

Triinu Eesmaa, University of Vienna
"Is There Felicitous Underspecification?"
Felicitous Underspecification is the thesis that there are uses of declarative sentences, which do not express a unique proposition. In this talk, I will do three things. First, I will spell out a set of assumptions, often held by semanticists, which will be placed under pressure if Felicitous Underspecification is true. Second, I will describe four alleged cases of felicitous underspecification. These cases involve gradable adjectives, quantifiers, demonstrative pronouns, and epistemic modals. I will argue that while the cases involving a gradable adjective, a quantifier, and a demonstrative pronoun are felicitously underspecified, the case with an epistemic modal is not. Third, I will describe a range of objections to Felicitous Underspecification and respond to them. 

10.35-12 (Chicago)/17.35-19 (Vienna)

Mike Tabatowski, University of Chicago
"High Negation Polar Questions as Requests for Epistemic Status"

Standard views of the semantics of polar questions take them to denote a partition on logical space, in which one cell corresponds to the radical proposition of the question and the other to its complement. An issue for approaches along these lines is that polar questions can appear in a variety of surface syntactic configurations, with corresponding semantic and pragmatic effects. My dissertation focuses on one such construction, the High Negation Polar Question (HNPQ) as in (1), contrasting it primarily with canonical Positive Polar Questions (PPQs) as in (2):

1) Don't Muslims eat beef?
2) Do Muslims eat beef?

The question in (1) carries with it a particular kind of bias, or expectation, on the part of the asker. In particular, the asker can be taken to expect that Muslims do, in fact, eat beef. It is an open question what the source and the nature of the bias inference in (1) is. A number of accounts take the obligatory presence of negation in a syntactically high position in HNPQs to suggest that they involve negation scoping over an epistemic or discourse-related operator, and attempt to derive the bias inference from there. My approach is also broadly along these lines; I propose modeling all polar questions as, roughly, requests for epistemic update. On this approach, the canonical PPQ in (2) means that the speaker would prefer that his or her epistemic state change to entail that Muslims eat beef. The HNPQ involves negation scoping over the "epistemic update" operator, expressing that the speaker would prefer his or her epistemic state not change (i.e., remain the same) while still entailing that Muslims eat beef. This, I suggest, intuitively captures the bias inference in a way that existing accounts do not, while also providing a good framework for a characterization of the conditions of use of polar questions more generally. This project is work in progress, so I would appreciate any feedback at any level of analysis.

Thursday, September 30

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
https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/98415260113?pwd=dnFVOGd2RGhGYXBiSjkzKzVTblBkQT09

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–––––––––––––––––––––
Max Kölbel

Institut für Philosophie
Universität Wien
Universitätsstraße 7 (NIG)
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Austria

Tel: +43 1 4277 46470

max.koelbel at univie.ac.at