[PLing] Talk by Nina Haslinger June 12

[Valerie Wurm]

Dear colleagues,

We would like to invite you to our next talk within the Theoretical 
Linguistics Colloquium.

Speaker: Nina Haslinger (ZAS Berlin)

Date/venue: June 12th, 16:45 - 18:15, Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Vienna, 
Seminarraum 1

Upcoming events as well as further information can be found on our 
website:
https://sites.google.com/view/totlvienna/upcoming

We are looking forward to seeing you at the talk,
Iva Kovač, Magdalena Lohninger and Valerie Wurm

Title & abstract:

Structural asymmetries between precise and imprecise expressions: How 
pragmatics can constrain morphosyntax

In many unrelated languages, there is a containment relation between 
definite plurals and *all*-type plural universal quantifiers (UQs) — for 
instance, the surface form *all the books* contains the plural definite 
*the books*. While some languages have plural UQ structures that do not 
contain overt definiteness marking (e.g. German *alle Bücher*), the 
reverse asymmetric pattern—a definite-plural structure properly 
containing a UQ structure—is (to my knowledge) unattested. This 
cross-linguistic asymmetry led Matthewson (2001), Winter (2001) and 
others to hypothesize that UQs are associated with „bigger“ structures 
than definite plurals. In principle, this could be implemented in terms 
of syntactic selection within the extended NP or by constraining the 
lexicalizable quantifier meanings such that the semantic argument of UQs 
must be an individual (cf. Matthewson 2001).

In the first part of this talk, I will argue that both cartographic and 
lexical-semantic approaches miss a broader generalization of which the 
definite/UQ asymmetry is a special case. Recent work in plural semantics 
(Malamud 2012, Križ 2015, Križ & Spector 2021 a.o.) has focused on 
*imprecision*, a form of semantic underspecification that gives rise to 
QUD-driven variation between stronger and weaker readings (cf. 
Lasersohn’s (1999) „pragmatic slack“), and to truth-value gaps in case 
both the stronger and the weaker readings are relevant. I will argue 
that across several syntactic categories and semantic types, imprecise 
expressions correspond to less complex structures than their precise 
counterparts.

In the second part of the talk, I provide a pragmatic account of this 
generalization in terms of a trade-off between two principles that could 
be viewed as grammaticalized submaxims of the Gricean maxim of 
Manner—„Be brief!“ and „Be precise!“ I formalize „Be brief!“ using 
Katzir’s (2007) notion of structural complexity and introduce a 
particular way of modeling the QUD-dependency of imprecise expressions, 
due to Križ & Spector (2021), to formalize „Be precise!“  I assume that 
„Be brief!“ and „Be precise!“ belong to a larger set of interacting 
Manner-related constraints, such that a sentence is blocked if it is not 
Pareto-optimal with respect to the constraints in this set. I further 
show that to fully derive the generalization, we need to assume a very 
liberal (and somewhat non-Gricean) precondition for the relevant form of 
pragmatic competition: Two sentences should compete whenever there is 
*some* way of choosing the QUD that makes them contextually equivalent.

The third part of the talk attempts to provide independent evidence for 
the proposal by looking at exceptional cases in which the two competing 
expressions are on a par with respect to either complexity or precision, 
so that the proposed constraint interaction predicts one of them to be 
clearly dispreferred. The resulting theoretical picture is such that 
Manner-related pragmatic preferences can constrain the way the grammar 
is organized. If correct, this provides a way of deriving some 
cartographic asymmetries, but also a „bottom-up“ method for identifying 
pragmatic preferences: If two truth-conditional sentences S and S’ are 
both acceptable even though S is structurally less complex, then there 
must be some independent pragmatic preference that favors S’. If time 
permits it, I will conclude by briefly discussing how this method can be 
applied to „Maximize Presupposition“ effects (Heim 1991, Sauerland 2008 
a.o.) and how „Be precise!“ interacts with our preference for stronger 
presuppositions.