Program - TBA

9:30 Stefan Keine Improper Agreement 10:00 Shayne Sloggett Case licensing in processing 10:30 Hannah Greene Non-culminating Accomplishments in Kwak'wala 11:15 Michael Clauss Invisible partial movement in child English 11:45 Jérémy Pasquereau Phonological features of labiality =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= 3rd Years' Poster Session South College 12:15-12:45

A Minimalist hypothesis about resumptive pronouns is that they should be no different from ordinary pronouns (McCloskey 2006). This paper substantiates the Minimalist hypothesis with respect to a particular view of pronouns: pronouns are ‘elsewhere’ elements. Just as the interpretation of ordinary pronouns, on this view, is determined by competition with anaphors, it is argued that the interpretation of resumptive pronouns is determined by competition with gaps. Based on systematic differences between optional and obligatory pronouns, I argue that the tail of a relative clause movement chain is realized as the least specified form available, ultimately a gap. Since the interpretive properties of resumptive pronouns are fully determined by external factors, pronouns must be part of the syntactic derivation, and not lexical items merged from the (traditional) lexicon.

I argue that Phi-Features (Person, Number, and Gender marking) are uniformly interpreted as presuppositions. Cooper (1979, Academic Press) first proposed the presuppositional interpretation, but only for the phi-features of pronouns. I argued for the presuppositional interpretation for the phi-features of full DPs and those of unbound pronouns (Sauerland 2003, SALT; 2008, Oxford UP). Based on new evidence (von Heusinger 2007 and others), I argue that the presuppositional approach can and should be extended to all phi-features, also those on bound pronouns.

Many languages have indefinites that trigger modal inferences in the absence of an overt modal. Some of these items signal speaker’s ignorance. Others indicate that an agent made a random choice. While the former type has received a lot of attention in recent years (see Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito (to appear) for references), random choice indefinites are comparatively less studied (but see Choi (2007); Choi and Romero (2008); Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito (2011)). This talk paves the way towards a better understanding of random choice indefinites by analyzing the interpretation and distribution of Spanish uno cualquiera. The sentence in (1) illustrates the random choice reading of uno cualquiera: (1) can be understood as saying that Juan took a card and that his choice was indiscriminate. This reading has a restricted distribution. Cases like (1), where uno cualquiera is in object position, are ambiguous between the random choice reading and an evaluative reading that conveys that Juan took an unremarkable card (and is compatible with him having chosen the card carefully.) In subject position, only the evaluative reading is available: (2) can only mean that an unremarkable student spoke. (1) Juan cogió una carta cualquiera. Juan took a card CUALQUIERA (2) Habló un estudiante cualquiera. Spoke a student CUALQUIERA We argue that uno cualquiera introduces a modal component that is anchored to the event described by the sentence. This component derives the random choice reading of sentences like (1) (roughly, that the agent’s decision is compatible with any of a number of actions under consideration), and blocks the random choice reading of (2) by deriving a contradiction. Our proposal is in line with some recent work on verbal modality where modal domains are projected from small particulars (events or individuals), rather than from whole worlds (see Hacquard (2006, 2009); Kratzer (2012)). References ALONSO-OVALLE, Luis and MENÉNDEZ-BENITO, Paula (2011). Expressing Indifference: Spanish Un NP Cualquiera. In Michael Ashton et al. (ed.), Proceedings of SALT 21. ALONSO-OVALLE, Luis and MENÉNDEZ-BENITO, Paula (to appear). Two Views on Epistemic Indefinites. Language and Linguistics Compass. CHOI, Jinyoung (2007). Free Choice and Negative Polarity: A Compositional analysis of Korean polarity sensitive items. Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania. CHOI, Jinyoung and ROMERO, Maribel (2008). Rescuing Existential Free Choice Items in Episodic Sentences. In O. Bonami and P. Cabredo Hoffner (eds.), Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 7, vol. 7. 77–98. HACQUARD, Valentine (2006). Aspects of Modality. Ph.D. thesis, MIT. HACQUARD, Valentine (2009). On the Interaction of Aspect and Modal Auxiliaries. Linguistics and Philosophy, 32:279–315. KRATZER, Angelika (2012). What ‘Can’ Can Mean. LOT Winter School 2012.

Modal verbs have intriguing scopal properties, which have received relatively little attention in the semantic literature. Compare can and must (both interpreted deontically): (1) John can’t jog. (2) John mustn’t jog. If we are right to treat can as having existential force and must as having universal force, there is a puzzle: can takes obligatory narrow scope in (1), while in the exact same frame, must takes obligatory wide scope (2). This talk has one main goal: show that the contrast is due to a movement–I label it escape–which only certain modals can undergo. In the case at hand, it is must that moves because it is unacceptable in a negative environment, while can doesn’t move, because it has no reason to do so. I will study escape in detail, (i) because it has properties that set it apart from other known displacements, viz it is motivated by polarity and it is a last resort, and also (ii) because of the original light it sheds on modals and on the interplay of syntax and semantics in the mechanism of polarity item licensing

A primary function of language is to allow for the exchange of information through a process of raising and resolving issues. To model this process, it is useful to have a notion of meaning that captures both informative and inquisitive content. This talk presents such a notion of meaning, and illustrates its advantages with respect to the classical, purely informational notion, focusing on the case of disjunction. The first part of the talk shows how the two main existing views on disjunction can be reconciled adopting an inquisitive perspective on meaning. The second part of the talk presents a uniform analysis of disjunctive questions and assertions in English, paying special attention to differences in form (e.g. declarative vs interrogative) and intonation (e.g. final rise vs final fall).

Information structural notions like topic/focus, given/new and contrastive/non-contrastive have a diverse range of effects on sentence structure and pronunciation. In this talk, I look at Contrastive Topic (CT) constructions, and present a novel account of their meaning and structure that can make sense of the range of CT marking strategies attested in the world’s languages. I will cover languages that mark CT prosodically (e.g. English), those that employ a discourse particle (e.g. Mandarin), and those that have a dedicated CT position in the syntax (e.g. Czech). A typical example of contrastive topic is given in (1). The object is pronounced with falling prosody, marking ‘the beans’ as the answer to the question of what Fred ate. The subject, on the other hand, bears a distinct rising contour, marking ‘Fred’ as a contrastive topic. The effect is to imply additional questions about what other people ate. (1) (What about FRED? What did HE eat?) FRED ... ate the BEANS. I review Büring’s (2003) account of CT and point out several challenges for it—for example, it doesn’t extend to CT questions (attested in Japanese) and it fails to account for effects of CT marking on word order and prosodic phrasing. In its place, I introduce a new model of contrastive topic that posits a Topic Abstraction operator in the left periphery, and defines CT as the focus associate of this operator. In English, the abstraction operator is lexicalized as a tonal clitic to an intonational phrase. The influence of information structure on phrasing is captured via a scope-prosody correspondence constraint requiring the operator and its associate to be realized within a single prosodic domain. The topic abstraction account is supported by a range of typologically diverse data. For one, it provides a simple way of understanding the possibility of dedicated CT positions in the syntax. Additionally, the account predicts the existence of CT morphemes that occur at a distance from the topic phrase itself, which are attested in Mandarin and Paraguayan Guaraní.

Presupposition is intensively discussed in the theoretical literature today, and a multitude of competing theories have been put forward that differ both conceptually and empirically (Beaver 2001, Beaver & Krahmer 2001, Chemla 2009, Fox 2008, 2012, George 2008, Geurts 1999, Heim 1983, Peters 1979, van der Sandt 1992, Schlenker 2008, 2009, 2010a,b). The goal of this talk is to contribute to this debate by raising an empirical problem for current theories, and to motivate the 'multi-dimensional' view of presupposition. The key observation is that some predicates have presuppositions that are not entailed by their assertive meanings (in the sense of generalized entailment), which I call 'non-entailed presuppositions'. I claim that when combined with certain quantifiers, predicates with non-entailed presuppositions give rise to meanings that pose a serious challenge for current theories of presupposition. In particular, the problem illustrates the need for a more expressive theory where assertive meanings and presuppositions can be true or false independently from each other. To this end, I advocate a multi-dimensional theory of presupposition. The multi-dimensional view was once popular in the 70's (Karttunen & Peters 1979), but it is now known that it faces an empirical problem called the 'Binding Problem' in quantified sentences. This was once considered to be a fatal problem for the multi-dimensional view and led to the development of modern one-dimensional theories, but I will offer a solution in the second talk.

As I will argue in my general-audience talk (and preview here), discourse coherence relations between sentences can constrain pronoun referents in a way suitable to generate sloppy readings in ellipsis contexts. For instance, sentence (1d), which stands in a RESULT relation to (1c), most easily means that people didn’t vote for Nixon: (1) a. Kennedy looked good on TV. b. People voted for him. c. Nixon looked bad on TV. d. People didn’t. In this talk, I claim that coherence relations are a type of projective meaning (see Tonhauser et al. 2013) that determines a hidden Question Under Discussion (QUD) as defined by Roberts (2012). For instance, (1b) is understood as a response to the (hidden) QUD What resulted from Kennedy looking good on TV? while (1d) is the response to QUD What resulted from Nixon looking bad on TV? (See Kehler 2009) for a previous suggestion along these lines.) Pronouns in the answers to questions are often quite constrained in their interpretations: (2) Q: Who does Bill like? A: He likes Mary. [He must refer to Bill] I argue that these constraints on pronouns follow from a very small modification to theories of Focus/Givenness such as Rooth (1992) and Schwarzschild (1999). Under Rooth’s system, for instance, a ~ (‘squiggle’) operator effectively ensures that the answer in (2) appears in the Hamblin (1973) denotation of the question. The ~ operator, I argue, can alter the local assignment function to achieve its purpose, setting the referents of pronouns such as he in (2) to properly fit them into the question denotation. With this machinery in place, the pronoun him in (1b) can receive a locally-derived meaning (Kennedy) via the ~ operator but this meaning can have a different extension (Nixon) when picked up by the ellipsis site in (1d). Next, I extend this analysis to embedded coherence relations, especially in quantified sentences containing a donkey pronoun, such as (3). The “consequent” clause he cries in (3) stands in a RESULT relation to the “antecedent” clause Jill teases a boy. In fact, this consequent stands in several different RESULT relations to the antecedent – one for each situation quantified over by whenever. I argue that the consequent clause is therefore evaluated with respect to a slightly different QUD for each situation quantified over, analogous to the way the phrase his sister in (4) generates a slightly different presupposition for each boy quantified over by every. Since each QUD for the consequent potentially pertains to a different boy, the pronoun he in he cries can end up referring to different boys (but in each situation refers to the boy that Jill teased in that situation). (3) Whenever Jill teases a boy, he cries. (4) Every boy loves his sister.

Across languages, we find epistemic indefinites, existential determiners that signal ignorance on the part of the speaker (see Haspelmath (1997)). Over the last fifteen years, a substantial body of work on the semantics of epistemic indefinites has appeared (see references in Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito (to appear)). Taken together, these studies outline a research program that aims to provide an explanatory semantic typology of epistemic indefinites by determining across which parameters epistemic indefinites can vary, how these parameters interact, and why. The work presented in this talk contributes to this enterprise by analyzing the epistemic effect of Spanish algún, and investigating the interaction of this effect with number morphology. In its singular form, Spanish algún conveys speaker’s ignorance. By using algún in (1a), the speaker signals that she does not know which student María married. Hence, it would be odd for her to add a namely continuation that explicitly identifies the student in question, as in (1b). Surprisingly, the plural version of algún, algunos, does not trigger an ignorance effect, as shown by (2). This talk provides an account of the contrast between (1) and (2). We will argue (i) that the epistemic effect of algún comes about because this item imposes an anti-singleton constraint on its domain of quantification, and (ii) that the interaction of this constraint with plural morphology blocks the epistemic effect. The talk also reports on work in progress that extends this account to the complex determiner algún que otro, which conveys an ‘I don’t know how many’ effect (witness (3)). The picture that emerges from this investigation is that epistemic effects triggered by indefinites are linked to properties of the domain of quantification, such as the size of the domain, its internal structure, and the type of entities quantified over. (1) a. María se casó con algún estudiante. María married with ALGÚN student. ‘María married some student or other.’ b. María se casó con algún estudiante # en concreto con Juan. María married with ALGÚN student namely with Juan. ‘María married some student or other, namely Juan.’ (2) María vive con algunos estudiantes, en concreto con Pedro y con Juan. María lives with ALGUNOS students, namely with Pedro and with Juan. ‘María lives with some students, namely Pedro and Juan.’ (3) María vive con algún que otro estudiante. María lives with ALGÚN QUE OTRO student ‘María lives with students – I don’t know how many.’ REFERENCES ALONSO-OVALLE, Luis and MENÉNDEZ-BENITO, Paula (to appear). Two Views on Epistemic Indefinites. Language and Linguistics Compass. HASPELMATH, Martin (1997). Indefinite Pronouns. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

The licensing of polarity items is an old and difficult problem. It is hard to find the exact conditions that govern the distribution of those elements (e.g. some, any), not simply due to the intrinsic complexity of the patterns, but also because it is not even clear whether one should look for conditions couched in syntactic or semantic terms. The discovery, due to the seminal work of Fauconnier (1975) and Ladusaw (1979), that downward-monotonicity is a characteristic property of the set of expressions whose presence can make an NPI acceptable (e.g. any in (1)), was a breakthrough which could have decisively tipped the scales in favor of a semantic approach. (1) John didn’t understand anything. That is, it could have become universally accepted that an NPI is only acceptable in a sentence S if it is in a position within S in which downward inferences are supported. But in fact, a vast majority of researchers who work on the topic view licensing essentially as a syntactic relation between a polarity item and an operator equipped with a certain negative feature, and do not take the monotonicity of the environment of the NPI as a direct factor. There is at least one good reason that supports their move: adding a negative expression to (1) does not lead to anti-licensing (2), as might be expected on strictly semantic grounds, given the monotonicity reversal; the acceptability of (2) is expected on the other hand if all that any requires is a structural relation with at least one appropriate operator above it: (2) It is impossible that John didn’t understand anything. In this talk, I propose a general account of licensing, both for NPIs and PPIs, which goes against the grain of the dominant syntactic approaches, as it maintains that polarity items are directly sensitive to the monotonicity of their environment. The theory, which relies on a few simple principles, also accounts for a number of unnoticed facts, and sheds new light on the dedicated mechanisms which evaluate the acceptability of polarity items, and on their interaction with other interpretative processes.

Polarity particles—words like yes and no—play a basic role in communication, and yet, their interpretation and distribution gives rise to a number of intriguing puzzles. This talk seeks to deepen our understanding of polarity particle systems cross-linguistically, revealing both their common core and the ways in which they vary from language to language. This investigation also has wider implications for linguistic theory, since polarity particles offer a valuable window onto the semantics of polar questions and assertions, which both license polarity particle responses. The common semantic core of polar questions and assertions is captured within the framework of inquisitive semantics. Subsequently, the account is extended to capture more involved patterns in the distribution of polarity particles, in particular in response to negative questions and assertions. The main predictions of the account concerning English are corroborated experimentally, and the cross-linguistic predictions are substantiated by data from German, French, Romanian, and Hungarian.

Presupposition projection in quantified sentences has been a particularly tantalizing issue for theories of presupposition (Karttunen & Peters 1979, Heim 1983, van der Sandt 1992, Beaver & Krahmer 2001, George 2008, Schlenker 2008, 2009, Chemla 2009, Fox 2012). In this talk I will offer a novel theory of presupposition projection in quantified sentences. Its main empirical support comes from the hitherto unnoticed correlation between presupposition projection through quantifiers and cross-sentential anaphora with quantificational antecedents: those quantifiers that support 'maxset anaphora' give rise to universal presuppositions, and those quantifiers that support 'refset anaphora' give rise to presuppositions weaker than universal presuppositions. I propose a multi-dimensional theory of presupposition where this correlation is directly captured by the mechanism of 'cross-dimensional anaphora'. The resulting theory, I claim, is empirically superior to its alternatives (cf. the first talk). In particular, it solves the Binding Problem that has plagued the multi-dimensional view of presupposition. Furthermore, it is also conceptually attractive in that it gives a principled explanation of the projection properties of quantificational expressions based on their anaphoric properties.

Two Effects of Context on Truth-Conditional Meaning The lexical items and syntactic structure of a sentence play a large role in its interpretation, but other factors often contribute as well, such as the time/place of utterance, other sentences in the same discourse, salient surrounding objects; extralinguistic goals; and more. This talk presents case studies highlighting the semantic effects of two such suprasentential factors: focus/information structure, and discourse coherence. The first study involves so-called conditional conjunctions such as (1) whose meanings are quite similar to conditional sentences involving the word if as in (2): (1) You get there early enough, and you usually find a seat. (2) If you get there early enough, you usually find a seat. I will present evidence that such sentences require a particular information structure, namely one where the first clause is Given in the context (or accommodated as Given). I argue that the conditional meaning results from the interaction between a modal quantifier such as usually in (1) and this information structure. A standard if-clause generally serves to restrict a modal quantifier (see Kratzer 1986) and since Given material tends to join the restriction of quantifier as well, this information structure mimics the effect of an if-clause. The second study examines how discourse coherence can constrain pronoun referents in a way previously thought to require syntactic c-command. Coherence is the name for the unspoken links between clauses in discourse, as shown in (3), which is most easily understood to mean (4): (3) Ezra flew into Hartford. He’s giving a talk at UMass. (4) Ezra flew into Hartford because he’s giving a talk at UMass. Hobbs (1979) noted that the establishment of such coherence relations also constrains pronoun reference, for instance constraining he in (3) to refer to Ezra when the discourse is understood as in (4). Ross (1967) described two readings for pronouns in ellipsis, as shown in (5). Most linguists, following Reinhart (1983), claim that the sloppy reading requires a ccommanding antecedent, such as Bill, which c-commands his in (5). I argue instead that discourse coherence constraints on pronouns can also generate sloppy readings, as shown in (6) and (7). (5) Bill loves his dog. John does, too. a. ...John loves Bill’s dog, too. (strict reading) b. ...John loves John’s dog, too. (sloppy reading) (6) The man who called Jane asked her out. The man who emailed Vera did ask Vera out, too. (7) Kennedy looked good on TV. People voted for him. Nixon looked bad on TV. People didn’t vote for Nixon.