Semantics Research Group Meeting, January 8, 2016

Time:

3:30pm, January 8, 2016

Place:

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

Talk 1

Speaker:

Mioko Miyama (University of Tokyo)

Title:

The proper treatment of the wide scope or reading in the English either … or … construction

Abstract:

The main concern of this talk is the availability of the wide scope or reading in the English either … or … construction and its interaction with the behavior of either. It is first pointed out that, even though there are several analyses of the either … or … construction argued for in previous studies (the movement analysis (Larson (1985)), the focus alternative semantics analysis (Beck & Kim (2006)), and the ellipsis analysis (Schwarz (1999))), there is a data set that is a hole in the empirical coverage of previous analyses. I propose that by extending the choice function analysis of disjunction (Winter (2001), Schlenker (2006)) to the either … or … construction, this data set is straightforwardly explained.

Talk 2

Speaker:

Ayaka Sugawara (Mie University)

Title:

Viewing English rise-fall-rise through experimental and corpus data

Abstract:

Jackendoff (1972) observes that the meaning of an ambiguous sentence such as ‘All the men didn’t go’ could be disambiguated by intonation. That is, the falling intonation at the end of the sentence indicates the All>Not reading, while if the sentence ends with a rising intonation, the sentence has the Not>All reading. (See Büring 1997, 2003 and Constant 2012, 2014 for formal analyses by assuming Topic marking or Constrastive Topic; See Ward and Hirschberg 1985 for counterarguments to the ability of intonation to disambiguate). In this talk, I will present some (preliminary) corpus data to support a prediction that if (rise-)fall-rise intonation then Not>All reading and not vice versa – which supports Constant’s analysis. I will also present results from comprehension task by English-speaking children and adults that show that they do reach different interpretations depending on the difference in intonation.