20/06/2019 Mini-workshop del GLiF a càrrec de Donka Farkas i Scott Grimm

17.06.2019

 

Data: Dijous, 20 de juny
Hora: 15:30 h
Lloc: Sala 52.701, Edifici 52, Roc Boronat - Campus del Poblenou
 
Donka Farkas
"Non-canonical questions"
 
Resum: This talk is part of a larger project whose aims are to understand the difference between canonical and non-canonical questions, and to draw a typology of the latter.

The first part of the talk sets up a series of pragmatic assumptions present in canonical questions, assumptions that follow from the semantics and conventional discourse effects of canonical interrogatives. The second part presents a particular type of non-canonical questions, called non-intrusive. Non-intrusive questions signal the absence of one of the pragmatic assumptions associated with canonical questions, namely the assumption of Addressee Compliance, i.e, they signal that the Speaker does not assume that the Addressee will settle the issue in the next move.

The case study discussed in detail is that of a special interrogative form in Romanian, namely an interrogative marked by the morpheme oare. In the account to be worked out in the talk, the role of this morpheme is to mark a special conventional discourse effect that affects the projected Addressee responses.

 
Scott Grimm
"Artifactual Aggregate Nouns: Reference and Countability"
 
Resum: Nouns like `furniture’ and `mail’ have long posed a puzzle for analyses of the mass/count distinction. They are non-countable like the core substance mass nouns (e.g., `clay’, `water’); however, their denotations apparently include individual objects and are often taken simply to be composed of them. I argue, in part based on experimental evidence, for a more complex analysis of these nouns: they describe artifacts, which have a function or ``associated event'', and this must be taken account in their meaning. Crucially, the associated event for a `furniture’ noun, which I argue to be part of a class of ``artifactual aggregate’’ nouns, typically requires multiple and often heterogeneous participants (e.g., furnishing a room usually requires several distinct pieces of furniture). Concomitantly, `furniture’ nouns normally refer to multiple objects, thus, possessing a form of collective reference; the non-countability facts follow from this property. An analysis is developed which builds the meanings for these nouns on the associated event. Further implications of this analysis for nominal lexical semantics will be discussed. (This talk describes joint work with Beth Levin.)

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