[PLing] Reminder: TLC talk by Paul Meisenbichler on June 3

[Iva Kovač]

Dear PLing-members,

This is a reminder for our next talk within the Theoretical Linguistics 
Colloquium.

Speaker: Paul Meisenbichler (MIT)

Date & time: Wednesday, 3 June, 16h
Location: Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Vienna, Seminarraum 8

The title and the abstract can be found below.

We are looking forward to seeing many of you there!

Valerie Wurm & Iva Kovač
The TLC organizers
https://sites.google.com/view/totlvienna/upcoming

---

Constraining reference to individuals in the modal and temporal 
dimension

The mechanism for indexing worlds is in principle unbounded: it can 
"bind" worlds over arbitrary structural distances and across an 
arbitrary number of intervening operators. The expressive power of this 
mechanism is at odds with the discovery of several constraints that 
severely limit the indexing options for worlds in specific environments. 
Attempts to directly constrain the indexing mechanism to avoid 
overgeneration in these cases (e.g. by restricting its application to 
certain syntactic environments) often do not go beyond a restatement of 
the facts and therefore rarely provide much insight. In this talk, I 
want to highlight the virtues of an alternative approach to indexing 
constraints that goes back to ideas by Uli Sauerland and Orin Percus 
(though my particular interpretation of the approach might at points 
diverge from what these authors had in mind). We start with the 
assumption that world-indexing is in principle free and unconstrained, 
and that any limits on indexing emerge as a side-effect of independent 
properties of the intensional system. Specifically, they emerge from the 
interaction of two components: (a) an ontology of individuals that 
treats them as world-bound and (b) a mechanism that relates individuals 
across worlds (a mechanism for "Quinean de re"). The strategy is to 
reduce all world-indexing constraints to compositional pressures imposed 
by the ontology: individuals need to match the world of the predicates 
that take them as arguments. Mismatches are typically resolved by the de 
re mechanism, but crucially not in all cases. The hypothesis is that 
illicit examples of world indexing are those where a mismatch cannot be 
resolved. I will show how this strategy generalizes to novel 
environments, predicting the emergence of world-indexing constraints 
that have not previously been observed. Finally, I will discuss 
potential extensions of this strategy to the temporal domain. 
Time-indexing faces the same dilemma: an unbounded binding mechanism 
conflicts with systematic indexing constraints. Since time-indexing 
constraints seem to be (more or less) parallel to world indexing 
constraints, a unified treatment is needed. Extending the general 
strategy to times means adopting an ontology of individuals as 
(time-bound) stages. I will discuss potential implementations of this 
extension, point out some facts about temporal modifiers that such an 
approach might explain and address the promise (but also the overall 
difficulty) of executing this program.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.univie.ac.at/pipermail/pling/attachments/20260601/d2165059/attachment.html>