Semantics Research Group Meeting, July 20, 2012

Time:

3:30pm, July 20, 2012

Place:

Keio University, Mita Campus,
South Annex, 7th floor

Talk 1

Speaker:

Kazuko Yatsushiro and Uli Sauerland (Center for General Linguistics, Berlin)

Title:

Question Act Decomposition for the Forgetful

Abstract:

Some have regarded question speech acts as complex involving an imperative plus something else (e.g. Searle's work). Others regard questions as primitive speech acts (e.g. Portner, Zaefferer). We show evidence for Searle's general view and more specifically for syntactic complexity of question speech acts. The evidence comes from the marking of forgetfulness by "again" as in "What's your name again?" (Sauerland 2009, Snippets), and by "-kke" in Japanese.

Talk 2

Speaker:

Yasutada Sudo (MIT)

Title:

The Problem of Gender Presuppositions and Anaphora in Quantified Sentences

Abstract:

Presuppositions of quantified sentences have been known as a recalcitrant problem for theories of presupposition projection, and many competing views can be found in the literature (Karttunen & Peter 1979, Cooper 1983, Heim 1983, van der Sandt 1992, Krahmer 1998, Beaver 1994, 2001, Beaver & Krahmer 1998, Schlenker 2008, 2009, George 2008, Fox 2008, 2010, Chemla 2009, Sudo, Romoli, Hackl & Fox 2012). This talk has two goals. I will first show that the gender presuppositions of bound pronouns cannot be handled in theories that use partial functions or three truth values to model presuppositions. The crux of the problem is that truth conditional meaning and presuppositions need to be completely dissociated, which is not achieved in these theories. Karttunen & Peters' (1979) two-dimensional theory is rich enough to not run into this problem, but the gender presuppositions cause the so-called "binding problem." The binding problem is often considered as a fatal problem for two dimensional theories, but I propose a solution using the mechanism of cross-sentential anaphora. An attractive feature of my analysis is that it accounts for the different projection properties of different quantificational determiners in a uniform way.