[PLing] TLC: Kyle Johnson on 13 May & Hans Kamp on 18 May

[Iva Kovač]

Dear PLing-members,

This is a reminder that Kyle Johnson will give a talk tomorrow, 13 May, 
at 17:00, at the Theoretical Linguistics Colloquium,
in Seminarraum 2, and an announcement of the next talk.

Speaker: Hans Kamp (University of Stuttgart)

Date & time: Monday, 18 May, 16:00
Location: Sensengasse 3a, 1090 Vienna, Seminarraum 2

Both titles and abstracts can be found below, as well as on the TLC 
website [1].

We are looking forward to seeing many of you at both talks!

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

---

Kyle Johnson - Getting B to follow A

I sketch a way of deriving Chomsky's Principles A and B of the binding 
theory. I first argue that English reflexive pronouns can, like English 
non-reflexive pronouns, be free variables. Also like non-reflexive 
pronouns, when bound, reflexives must be bound by a Büring-like special 
binder which I call an "A-probe." I suggest that Principle A derives 
from a requirement that certain A-probes impose. Reflexive pronouns are 
the exponent of those special A-probes, and the requirement that the 
special A-probes impose is that their exponent (the reflexive) have the 
same value as their argument (the DP in the Specifier of the A-probe). 
This requirement is expressed as a presupposition. All other A-probes 
are exactly like the special one, except that they have no accompanying 
presupposition. This allows Principle B to be a consequence of Heim's 
Maximize Presupposition.

---

Hans Kamp - A Syntax and Semantics for Russell's 'I thought your yacht 
was larger than it is'

The sentence quoted in the title is from Russell's _On Denoting_. There 
it has the flavor of a joke, a cute way, it seems to show the scope 
ambiguities generated by the possibility of eliminating definite 
descriptions at different scope levels. But there is much more to the 
syntax and semantics of this sentence than could have been articulated 
in the world in which _On Denoting_ was conceived and written (and 
achieved Russell's seminal proposal). In more recent times the sentence 
has come within the focus of linguists like von Stechow and Heim, within 
the context of investigations about the comparative.

My personal current interest in the sentence stems from it being at the 
intersection of two larger projects I have been involved in for some 
years. The first is MSDRT ('Mental State Discourse Representation 
Theory'), an extension of DRT designed to deal with sentences used to 
make complex attitude attributions. The second is a project about the 
syntax and semantics of the different forms and constructions - 
positive, comparative, equative and others -- of scalar adjectives, such 
as 'large', 'long', 'happy' and countless others). The analysis of 
Russell's sentence I will present in the talk combines results from 
these two projects. In my presentation of this analysis I will sketch 
the basic features of the syntax-semantics interface frameworks 
developed in these projects and show how they can be combined into a 
single overarching framework, suitable for sentences like this one from 
Russell.

The talk will end with three questions that go beyond the particular 
frameworks used. These are about:

(i) the role of tense and aspect in the semantics of Russell's sentence 
and some variants of it;

(ii) the different ways in which noun phrases can get wide scope and/or 
directly referential interpretations; and

(iii) how the central conception behind MSDRT - that attitude 
attributions provide partial descriptions of the mental states of their 
attributees - is compatible with the common practice in attitude 
attribution of specifying the contents of attributed attitudes in terms 
that the attributeel would not be able to recognize.



Links:
------
[1] https://sites.google.com/view/totlvienna/upcoming
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.univie.ac.at/pipermail/pling/attachments/20260512/9a8fa114/attachment.html>