Semantics Research Group Meeting, July 11, 2014

Time:

4:00pm, July 11, 2014

Place:

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

Talk 1

Speaker:

Yuki Ito (University of Maryland)

Title:

(Some) Essentially Plural Predicates are Singular: Evidence from Group Nouns

Abstract:

Available here.

Talk 2

Speaker:

Yasutada Sudo (University College London)

Title:

A super strong connective in Japanese and higher-order scalar implicatures

Abstract:

In addition to conjunctive and disjunctive connectives, Japanese has a number of other types of connectives (Kuno 1973). Here we will focus on ya, which has two major semantic/pragmatic features, (i) anti-exhaustivity and (ii) polarity sensitivity. We propose to account for them as higher-order scalar implicatures derived in competition with conjunctive and disjunctive alternatives.