October 21, 2005: Richard Zuber, Norihiro Ogata, Eric McCready

Time:: 2:30pm, October 21, 2005
Place:: Collaboration Room 2, 4th floor, Building 18, University of Tokyo Komaba campus.
Talk 1: 2:30pm
Speaker:: Richard Zuber, CNRS, Paris
Title:: Semantics of Presupposition Inducers
Abstract:: It is well-known that presupposition inducers can have different categories, usually functional ones. This means that the relation of presupposition can hold between expressions which are of sub-sentential category. In this talk I It is well-known that presupposition inducers can have different grammatical proppose to account for such non-sentential origins of presuppositions by suggesting that presupposition inducers have as denotations specific elements of relativised functional algebras. Functional algebras are denotational algebras whose elements are functions (denotations of functional expressions of the same category as a given presupposition inducer). Functional algebras are relativised if their unit element 1 has been changed to a (and correspondingly the complement has been relativised to a). For instance, to take the simplest case, if B is the algebra of all properties, H is the property of being a human then B(H) is the algebra relativied by H, that is the set of all propertiers included in H in which H is a new unit element and the complement C(X) of X is equal to the intersection of X' with H. One observes that in such algebras all elements and their complements are included in H (« entail » H) and thus H can be considered as a (lexical) presupposition of any element of B(H). By generalising this step to any functional category (where the relativising element will be a constant function) and adding some additional constraints (atomicity of algebras) we can account for the different categorial status of presupposition inducers. Various examples of presuppositions will be discussed in this context and the way of obtaining sentential presuppositions from non-sentential ones will be indicated.
Talk 2: 3:30pm
Speaker:: Norihiro Ogata, Osaka University
Title:: Remarks on Kratzer's "Ordering-Premise" Semantics of Modalities and Conditionals
Abstract:: In the formal semantics of natural language, Kratzer's (1981; 1991) "ordering-premise" semantics, which is a possible world semantics but has two types of premise sets:"modal bases" and "ordering sources," is the standard theory of modalities and conditionals, whereas in formal logic, Kripke semantics and selection-function semantics are the standard semantics of modal logics and conditional logics, respectively. The naive question about Kratzer's "ordering-premise" semantics is why it requires two types of premise sets simultaneously. I will review Kratzer's "ordering-premise" semantics and try to propose a simpler alternate, "multi-modal premise" semantics.
Talk 3: 5:00pm
Speaker:: Eric McCready, Osaka University
Title:: Japanese Evidentials as Modals
Abstract:: Available in PDF.

October 21, 2005: Richard Zuber, Semantics of Presupposition Inducers; Norihiro Ogata, Remarks on Kratzer's "Ordering-Premise" Semantics of Modalities and Conditionals; Eric McCready, Japanese Evidentials as Modals

October 21, 2005: Richard Zuber, Semantics of Presupposition Inducers;
Norihiro Ogata, Remarks on Kratzer's "Ordering-Premise" Semantics of Modalities and Conditionals;
Eric McCready, Japanese Evidentials as Modals