EALing 2008 ARCHIVE Ecole
d'Automne
Ealing took place from September 16th to September
25th 2008:
Ealing a eu lieu du 16 Septembre au 25 Septembre 2008
Ealing 2008 was
organized by the Department of Cognitive Studies of the École Normale
Supérieure with the support of the École Normale Supérieure Foundation
the Euryi Project Presupposition: A
formal pragmatic approach funded by the European Science Foundation and the
Research Alliance Ecole Normale Supérieure-University College London
-Université Pierre et Marie Curie.
Ealing 2008 a été organisée par le département d'études cognitives de
l'École Normale Supérieure, avec le soutien de la Fondation de l'École Normale
Supérieure,
du projet Euryi Presupposition: A
formal pragmatic approach financé par la European Science Foundation et de
l'alliance pour la recherche Ecole Normale Supérieure-University College London
-Université Pierre et Marie Curie
Klaus Abels Lecturer,
University College London
Sjef Barbiers Meertens
Instituut and Utrecht University
Adriana Belletti Professor,
Universita di Siena
Bart Geurts Doctor, University
of Nijmegen
Sabine Iatridou Professor, MIT
Nathan Klinedinst Lecturer,
University College London
Nausicaa Pouscoulous Lecturer,
University College London & Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology, Leipzig
Daniel Rothschild Columbia
University
Philippe Schlenker Directeur de
Recherches, Institut Jean Nicod-Ecole Normale Supérieure & NYU
Edward Stabler Professor, UCLA
Arnim von Stechow Professor
Emeritus of General Linguistics - Tübingen University
Michael K. Tanenhaus Beverly
Petterson Bishop and Charles W.Bishop Professor of Brain and Cognitive
Sciences; Professor of Linguistics; Director, Center for Language Sciences
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences - University of Rochester
Richard Breheny Professor,
University College London
Heather Ferguson University
College London
Ivona Kucerova Research Associate,
UCL Linguistics
Geraldine Legendre Professor -
Johns Hopkins University
Christian Rétoré Professeur
-Université de Bordeaux 1
Luigi Rizzi Professor,
University of Siena
Paul Smolensky
Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Cognitive Science - Johns Hopkins University
Course Title: Order, Structure, Derivations
Handouts: Handout1
Course Description: In this
course I will discuss the relation between theories of linear order,
hierarchical structure, and the structure of syntactic derivations. In
particular, I will discuss how a generalized version of the constraint against
improper movement generates correct expectations about possible and impossible
linear orders. I will discuss the relation between the hierarchy of functional
projections within the clause and the generalized constraint on improper
movement. I also discuss the possibility of reducing one to the other or both
to the theory of locality.
Requisites: The course is an
advanced course in syntax.
Course Title: Microvariation in Syntactic
Doubling
Handouts: Handout1 Handout2 Handout3 Handout4
Course Description: Syntactic
doubling, e.g., subject pronoun doubling, wh-pronoun doubling, possessive
doubling, auxiliary doubling, negative concord, agreement, etc., raises a
number of questions about the architecture of natural language, such as: - Does
doubling violate compositionality/economy? - Why is redundancy of (morpho-)
syntactic information possible or necessary? - Which syntactic structures allow
doubling? - What are the systematic properties of doubling? - How to account
for cross-linguistic differences in syntactic doubling, in particular minimal
differences between closely related dialects? In this course I will discuss
these issues within the framework of the ESF project European Dialect Syntax
(Edisyn).
Course Title: Structures and Strategies: Topics
on the structural correlate of discourse related syntactic operations.
Handouts: Handout1 Handout2 Handout3 Handout4
Course Description: A number of
discourse related syntactic structures will be investigated in terms of a
detailed cartography of syntactic configurations. Special attention will be
devoted to the analysis of cleft (and pseudo-cleft) sentences in different
(Romance) languages aiming at differentiating their possibly varying discourse
value and at clarifying their relation with other (clause and small clause)
structures, as well as to the analysis of structures crucially involving the
edge of the clause. The issue as to how different syntactic computations may be
made appeal to in similar contexts will also be carefully discussed bringing
evidence from acquisition (and pathology) in the domain of subject vs object
relative clauses and passive.
Prerequisites: Some familiarity
with the recent literature on minimalism and cartography.
References: Detailed references
and links will be provided in class and will be then posted here.
Titre en français: Structures
et stratégies: Corrélats structurels d’opérations syntaxiques liées aux
discours.
Description en français: Un
nombre de structures seront étudiées en termes d’une cartographie détaillée des
configurations syntaxiques. On prêtera une attention particulière à l’analyse
des phrases clivées (et pseudo-clivées) dans différentes langues (romanes) avec
le but de différencier leurs fonctions variables dans le discours et de
clarifier leurs relations avec d’autres structures (propositions et "small
clauses"). On analysera aussi des structures qui mettent en jeu
crucialement les positionsà la périphérie des phrases. On discutera enfin en
détail la question de comment on peut faire appel à des calculs syntaxiques
différents dans des contextes semblables: ces discussions se baseront en partie
sur des données d’acquisition (et de pathologie) dans le domaine des structures
relatives sujet vs objet et des sstructures passives.
Course Title: Implicatures
Handouts: Handout1 Handout2 Handout3 Handout4 Handout5
Course Description: Recently,
so-called quantity implicatures have received considerable attention in the
semantic and pragmatic literature. Prototypical instances of such implicatures
arise when the speaker uses a relatively weak scalar expression, like
"some", where a stronger one might have been employed. Thus,
according to the standard pragmatic story, "Some of the kangaroos are
sick" conveys, inter alia, that not all the kangaroos are sick, and this
is not as part of the meaning of "some" but rather because the
speaker should have said that all the kangaroos are sick, if that's what he
believed to be the case. One of the issues in the recent literature is whether
this standard story is on the right track, in the first place, or whether a
radically different, semantic treatment is called for. Other, and related,
issues concern the interpretation of scalar expressions in embedded positions,
free choice permission, the acquisition of scalar terms, and how adults process
these expressions.
Description en français:
Récemment, les domaines de la pragmatique et de la sémantique se sont beaucoup
intéressés à ce que l'on appelle les implicatures de quantité. Celles-ci sont
typiquement engendrées lorsqu'un locuteur utilise une expression scalaire
faible, telle que 'certains', là où il aurait pu en employer une plus forte
(telle que 'tous'). Ainsi, selon l'approche pragmatique standard,
"certains kangourous sont malades" exprime, entre autres, l'idée que
tous les kangourous ne sont pas malades: ceci non pas sur la base de la
signification de 'certains', mais en vertu du fait que le locuteur aurait dû
dire que tous les kangourous étaient malades, si cela était ce qu'il pensait
être le cas. La première question que se pose la littérature récente est tout
simplement celle de savoir si, pour commencer, l'approche standard est sur la
bonne voie, ou s'il faut lui préférer un traitement sémantique radicalement
différent. D'autres problèmes, corrélés, sont également abordés relatifs à
l'interprétation des expressions scalaires lorsque ces dernières sont
enchâssées dans des expressions complexes, les questions de "free choice
permission", ainsi que d'acquisition des termes scalaires et de traitement
cognitif chez l'adulte de ces expressions.
Course Title: On the Syntax and Semantics of
Imperatives
Handouts: Handout1
Course Description: We will be
investigating the type of sentences called "imperatives", which can
be used as commands and permissions. The lectures will contain a brief overview
of the most frequented research areas in the existing syntactic and semantic
literature and will focus on certain open questions. This course touches on
verbal morphosyntax, clausal structure, negation, modals, mood, performatives,
apparent mismatches between syntactic form and semantic interpretation.
Nathan
Klinedinst and Daniel Rothschild
Course Title: Foundations of presupposition
theories
Handouts: Handout1 Handout2 Handout3 Handout4
Course Description: This course
will introduce the concept (or concepts) of presupposition
and give a critical presentation of classical theories of presupposition projection -- i.e. theories of how
(and, in some cases, why) complex sentences inherit or fail to inherit the
presuppositions that are associated with their parts when uttered in isolation.
Material to be covered includes non-standard logics and work by Stalnaker,
Gazdar, Karttunen, Soames and Heim among others. [The material and critical
remarks in this course might serve as helpful background for Schlenker's
course, which will cover more recent theories of presupposition projection].
Lecture Title: Auxiliary selection - a test case
for optimization at the lexicon/syntax interface
Handout: here
Abstract: This talk will
address the issue of auxiliary selection (be vs. have) in both the present
perfect and in passive constructions cross-linguistically. The present perfect
exhibits considerable variation cross-linguistically. Some well-known languages
(e.g. Italian, French, Dutch, and German) exhibit a split; others exclusively
select have (e.g. Spanish); yet others exclusively select be (e.g. Slavic
languages, Shetland English, and some Italian dialects). In contrast, the
choice of auxiliary in passive constructions in these languages is highly
restricted: it’s never have, it’s (almost) exclusively be. I propose that the
choice of a particular auxiliary in a given context in any language results
from optimizing over two mappings: one between lexico-aspectual properties and
argument status (internal vs. external), the other between argument status and
the marked auxiliary have -- provided the constraints on such mappings are
violable and re-rankable cross-linguistically. In particular, I argue against a
direct mapping from lexico-aspectual properties to auxiliary, derive three
universals of auxiliary selection from the formal OT analysis, and discuss how
the Unaccusative Hypothesis should be construed from the present perspective.
If time allows, I will also present an analysis of person-based auxiliary
selection in Italian dialects and confront the difficult problem of formalizing
a predictive typology of person-based splits.
Lecture Title: Categorial grammars for computing the
correspondence between syntax and semantics -- an example of interplay between
mathematical logic and computational linguistics
Abstract: Ajdukiewicz (1931)
introduced categorial grammars for the formal language of ordinary mathematical
logic, and Bar-Hillel
(1953) adapted it to word order in view of natural language formalisation.
Lambek (1958) turned it into a plain logical system, a non commutative ancester
of Girard's linear logic (1986).
Now that the relation of the Lambek calculus to intuitionistic logic and typed
lambda-calculus is well mastered, following Church's representation of
predicate calculus (1930), from a categorial analysisone can compute, as
explored by Montague in the
seventies, a representation of the conveyed meaning, a lambda term encoding a
logical fomula.
We will discuss the possiblity to extend such a correspondence to
linguistically more relevant syntax model like Stabler's minimalist grammars,
or to richer semantics (discourse, lexical semantics).
Lecture Title: Freezing and the delimitation of
movement
Slides: slides slides2
Abstract: A comprehensive
formal theory of movement must include:
1. locality principles, determining the maximal structural space which movement
can cover;
2. delimiting principles, determining under what conditions movement can start,
and must stop.
In this talk I will give e general overview of the issues, and then will focus
on delimiting principles, with special reference to the cases which force a
movement chain to stop and pass the representation on to the interpretive
systems.
Argumental and Criterial (scope-discourse) positions are natural
"delimiting" points for movement. I will look in some detail at the
effects of a particular kind of delimiting principle, Criterial Freezing,
terminating a chain as soon as a criterial position is reached. A system based
on the criterial freezing idea will be illustrated, and will be used to offer a
unitary explanation of several different cases in which movement fails:
unmovability of wh phrases from indirect questions, unmovability of subjects in
various environments, etc. Various kinds of strategies that natural languages
use for circumventing the freezing effects will be discussed and illustrated.
In the last part of the talk I will look at the cleft construction, which seems
to raise a significant challenge to the freezing approach, in that the clefted
constituent can apparently continue to move (who is it _
that you met _?). I will show that some surprising properties of this
kind of "extra movement" from clefts (e.g., in terms of selective
sensitivity to weak islands) are naturally amenable to the freezing approach.
Course Title: The New Presupposition Debate
Course Description: For the
last 30 years, dynamic semantics has dominated research on presupposition
computation. The dynamic framework was criticized from the start, however,
because it is so expressive that it can stipulate in the lexical entries of its
operators the data it was supposed to explain in the first place. Several new
approaches seek to address this problem of explanatory depth. We will provide a
brief survey of a subset of those.
Lecture Title: Making good on the promissory note:
Generative grammar in the cognitive science of language
Slides: here
Abstract: As defined by Chomsky
(1988:3, inter alia), the central questions of generative grammar are:
1. What is the system of knowledge?
2. How does this system of knowledge arise in the mind/brain?
3. How is this knowledge put to use?
4. What are the physical mechanisms that serve as the material basis for this
system of knowledge and for the use of this knowledge?
I will present a high-level overview of an argument—developed in detail in The
Harmonic Mind (Smolensky & Legendre, 2006, MIT Press)—that in the form of
Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993), generative grammar has much to
contribute to research addressing all of these questions.
Course Title: Grammar in performance and learning
models
Course website: here
Course Description: What models
of language recognition, production, and learning can account for the basic
properties that human languages have? This course will describe the surprising
consensus that has emerged in grammar, and will explore computational models of
recognition, incremental reanalysis, and learning of languages, with particular
attention to discontinuous dependencies of the sort found in remnant movement
and reduplication. We would like to understand why common patterns of these
sorts are natural and expected.
Course Title: Four lectures on degree semantics
(and syntax)
Course Description:
The degree argument is pervasive in natural language. Unlike the individual
argument but like the world/situation-argument, the time and the event
argument, the degree argument is implicit. Degree semantics is mostly concerned
with the analysis of comparative and superlative constructions of gradable
adjectives and adverbs. But many other constructions crucially rely on the
existence of a degree argument: some nominalisations (the love of Anna, the velocity
of the car), how-questions, comparative quantifiers based on gradable
adjectives (many, most, few), exclamatives and the complements of emotive
factives (It is amazing how clever Max is, What an idiot John is!) among
others.
The lectures give an introduction into the basic notions of degree semantics
and syntax, an application to some interesting constructions and the
construction of LFs from surface syntax. Among the possible topics to be
treated are:
• What are degrees? Construction of degrees as equivalence classes based on
empirical equivalence relations, numerical degrees (2 meters) as special cases
thereof.
• Comparative constructions, numerical degree phrases and cross-polar anomaly,
the interpretation of quantifiers in than-clauses. Scope interactions of the
comparative with verbal quantifiers (modals). The positive.
• Superlative constructions.
• Syntax and Semantics: The construction of logical forms from surface syntax.
Literature (will be made available as downloads on my homepage):
The construction of degrees will be based on (Cresswell, 1976) and (Klein,
1991). The analysis of comparative constructions is based on (von Stechow,
1984b, von Stechow, 1984a) updated by recent work by (Heim and Kennedy, 2002),
(Heim, 2006), (Schwarzschild and Wilkinson, 2002), (Beck, 2008) among others.
For the interaction of the comparative with modals see (Heim, 2001) and
(Krasikova, 2007). For the positive see Cresswell op.cit. and (von Stechow,
2007). The analysis of comparative and superlative quantifiers is based on
(Hackl, 2000, Hackl, 2006). The discussion of superlative constructions builds
on work by (Szabolcsi, 1986), (Heim, 2004 (1999)), (Sharvit and Stateva, 2002).
For the construction of LFs see (von Stechow, 2008).
Michael
Tanenhaus
Course Title: Using eye movements to study spoken
language
Course Description: In this
course we review some of the burgeoning literature on the use of eye movements
to study spoken language processing, focusing on issues of interest to
researchers in linguistics. We highlight some of the seminal studies and
examine how this ‘visual world’ approach to studying language processing can be
used to address issues in phonetics, spoken word recognition, parsing,
reference resolution and interactive conversation. We consider some of the
methodological issues that come to the fore when psycholinguists use eye
movements to examine spoken language comprehension, including issues of data
analysis.
Specific Topics:
phonetics/phonology, referential domains, and some mix of expectation/attention
to be determined in part by the collective interests of the students in the
class
Antomo, Mailin Ines. J.W.Goethe-Universität. Verb Second
in weil-clauses in German: Embedded V2 and the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface
Dafina, Ratiu. University of Nantes. On the syntax
and semantics of multiple questions
Falco, Michelangelo. Scuola Normale Superiore. The
Licensing of Pronominal Features in WCO and OPC
Falkum, Ingrid Lossius. University College London.
Polysemy: Lexically Generated or Pragmatically Inferred?
Galery, Thiago. University College London.
Modularity, Singular Content, and the Deferred Uses of Indexicals
Grove, Kyle. Cornell University. Why Unergatives
Have it Hard: Garden-path Asymmetries as Causative-PP Co-Occurence Restrictions
Liu, Mingya. University of Tübingen. Negation,
Conventional Implicature, and Positive Polarity Items
Peredy, Marta. Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian
Academy. Aktionsart of the DE-constructions
Cao, Hui. University College London. On mei
‘every’ and dou ‘all’ in Mandarin Chinese
Schaden, Gerhard. CNRS Laboratoire de linguistique formelle.
The Nature and Necessity of Generalization
2:00 LaCasse: Restrictions on the space of
Context Change Potentials
2:45 Rothschild: A Less
Stipulative Dynamic Semantics
3:45 Chemla: Presuppositions
from alternatives: getting the fine-grained picture
4:30 Abrusan: On the triggering
problem
Dynamic semantics lacks explanatory power. For
any classical operator, it is possible to construct many dynamic operators
which agree on the non-presuppositional cases but diverge on the
presuppositional cases. However, only a few dynamic operators appear in natural
language, and their bivalent meanings and presupposition projection properties
seem to be constant across languages.
I solve this problem by restricting the space of dynamic operators with some
simple and intuitive constraints on the space of sentential operators and
quantifiers. The constraints I posit make very strong predictions about the
space of natural language operators:
- They predict only a small list of possible propositional connective meanings,
including all propositional English connectives.
- They predict conservativity and universal presupposition projection from both
the restrictor and nuclear scope of a quantifier.
These predictions make the constraints an effective solution to the
over-generation problem of dynamic semantics.
Abstract: Heim's classic paper "On the
Projection Problem for Presuppositions" (1983) proposed a replacement of
truth-conditional semantics with a dynamic semantics that treats meanings as
instructions to update the common ground. Heim's system predicts the basic
pattern of presupposition projection quite accurately. The classic objection to
this program (including other versions of dynamic semantics) is that the
treatment of binary connectives is stipulative, and other, equally natural
treatments fail to make the right predictions about presupposition projection.
I give a variation on Heim's system that is designed to escape this objection.
Abstract: I present a system for
presupposition projection which relies on alternatives for presuppositional
material. I will discuss the following properties of this system. First, it is
predictive (see Rothschild's talk). Second, this theory is an extension of a
theory of scalar implicatures (including free choice inferences). Consequently,
the triggering problem (see Abrusan's talk) becomes comparable to the symmetry
problem with usual scales. Besides, this prompts the question of the status of
presuppositions, what is it (common belief?) and how does it come about (pre-
or post-suppositions?). Third, this theory predicts different presuppositions
for quantified sentences with different quantifiers (e.g., none vs. numerical quantifiers), as
is now supported by experimental data.
Abstract: It is argued that the truth value of
atomic sentences has to depend on the properties of their arguments, in other
words the atomic sentence has to be about its arguments. Concentrating on
verbal presupposition triggers, I argue that those entailments, which, if they
were to be false, could prevent the atomic sentence to be about its arguments,
are turned into presuppositions.
Abstract: The generation of implicatures is a
common process during everyday language comprehension. For example, a sentence
such, “Mary ate some of the cake” normally implies that Mary ate some, but not
all of the cake. However, it is generally agreed among linguists that the ‘but
not all’ implication is a defeasible pragmatic inference [3,4]. A theoretical
debate about the more common Scalar Implicatures (SIs) has emerged that
contrasts two views of processing. The ‘default’ view [3] is that the ‘but not
all’ SI is generated automatically without attention to context. The
contextualist view [1,4] is that even common implicatures are not special and
require context to be checked before generation. The issue we examined,
therefore, was how scalar terms are processed on-line as the current sentence
is unfolding.
Here we report a visual world study investigating the time-course of
language-mediated eye movements towards quantity-constrained referents in a
scene. The current design resolves confounds from previous attempts to
investigate on-line SI processing [2], which include differing visual salience
of the target referents and interference from a secondary task. Sentences like
those shown below were presented orally together with a picture showing,
amongst other things, an all referent (all broken bottles) and a some referent
(some broken plates).
(a) Mark
has smashed all of the bottles as he was clearing up after dinner.
(b) Mark has smashed some of the plates as he was clearing up after dinner.
Relative proportions of anticipatory
eye-movements (i.e. eye-movements that started reliably before the onset of the
target word “bottles” or “plates”) indicated an early bias towards the
appropriate quantifier-dependent referent in (a). In contrast, the respective
bias in (b) was delayed by a conflict between the some and all referents. This
suggests that while the semantically specified quantifier all leads to rapid
disambiguation of the referents the weak scalar quantifier some leads to
initial ambiguity of the referents. We discuss how these findings relate to
current theories of SI processing.
Abstract: Semantic entailment is sufficient
for licensing deacentuation as a means of grammatical marking of givenness in
English (Schwarzschild 1999). In Czech, however, the givenness licensing
conditions are stronger: only elements existentially presupposed in the
relevant contextual domain count as given. In this talk I will address the
question of what it exactly means to be existentially presupposed in the
context of givenness.
Abstract: This study addresses the question
how and when children learn to deal with the presupposed content of an
utterance. Discourse particles such as again, only and too are particularly
interesting for such an investigation, because in many languages children seem
to master their use extremely early (see, for instance, Nederstigt, 2003 for a
corpus study on the production of German auch, and the literature findings
mentioned therein on other languages). So far the developmental literature on
discourse particles has mainly been directed towards children’s understanding
of expressions like too (and its German and Dutch counterparts) in contexts
where its focus (on the subject or object of the action) is ambiguous (e.g. see
Berger et al., 2007; Bergsma, 2006; Hüttner, et al., 2004). These studies are
concerned with relatively old children (typically 4-to-10-year-olds) and tend
to show that while children’s production of discourse particles is proficient
from very early on, their understanding lags behind until school age (see also
Paterson et al., 2003).
The aim of my work is to establish whether very younger children are able to
draw the presuppositional inferences associated with the expressions too and
again (‘auch’ and ‘nochmal’ in German). From the age of two children are
proficient in their use of these expressions, but it is not clear that they
fully appreciate their semantic and pragmatic import. 24 3-year-olds and 24
2,5-year-olds participated in this study. Children were presented with two toy
characters, one of which performed an action (e.g., dance). The child then
heard either the phrase, “Anna wants to dance, too,” or “Anna wants to dance again”,
where crucially the name “Anna” hadn’t been used before, and was asked to help
Anna do it. Thus, in order to assign the correct referent to “Anna”, pick up
the right puppet and make her dance, for instance, the child had to make an
inference based on the presupposition carried by either too or again. The
performance of 3-year-olds was above chance level for both auch and nochmal,
while 2,5-year-olds responded randomly. I will present the findings of this
study and discuss the implications they have for the early understanding of
presuppositions. A possible explanation for the 2,5-year-old results is that
the reference assignment task might in itself be too demanding for them.
Therefore, I am currently running a new study with a simpler design to establish
whether poor performance is linked to their (mis)understanding of the discourse
particles or to the design of the experiment. I will also present preliminary
data on this new experiment.