Semantics Research Group Meeting, July 27, 2018

Time:

4:30pm, July 27, 2018

Place:

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

Talk 1

Speaker:

Teruyuki Mizuno (University of Connecticut)

Title:

Toward a unified account of Japanese evidential youda: A Causal Bayesian approach

Abstract:

(Joint work with Muyi Yang (UConn))

This study explores a Japanese evidential marker youda. There is a general agreement that p-youda states that a certain relation holds between the prejacent p and some piece of evidence e. McCready & Ogata (2007) (=M&O) observed the importance of the inference from evidence e to prejacent p, and proposed truth conditions that require e to raise p's probability to a value greater than 0.5 but less than 1. Davis & Hara (2014) and Hara (2017) (=(D&)H) argued that youda encodes inference that proceeds exclusively upwards in asymmetric causal structures (cf. Pearl 2000), and proposed that p in p-youda be a causal ancestor of e.

We address three issues regarding youda that cannot be settled by M&O and (D&)H: (i) the existence of speaker's epistemic commitment (ii) its actual modal force (iii) the causal directions that youda allows. Drawing on novel data and arguments, we provide a new semantics built upon a Causal Bayesian Network model (Pearl 2000) and argue that p-youda is true only if p is a weak necessity epistemic modal and it presupposes that the truth condition is supported by upward causal inference from e.

Talk 2

Speaker:

Uli Sauerland (Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS))

Title:

The Thought Uniqueness Hypothesis

Abstract:

I pursue a unification of the linguistic generalizations of economy (Fox 2000), type rigidity (Hirsch 2017), exhaustivity (Chierchia et al. 2012), and efficiency (Meyer 2013). The condition I propose, the Thought Uniqueness Hypothesis (TUH), applies at the conceptual level irrespective of the 'surface structure'. Abstractly, the TUH states that for each expressible proposition only a single 'best' representation is available. One the basis of lambda-calculus, I detail a concrete proposal that can derive the linguistic evidence available and makes some novel predictions. I also briefly consider possible alternative statements of the TUH on the basis of combinatorial logic, and I show that the TUH can account for scope in passive sentences and other cases without reference to 'surface structure' contra e.g. (Chomsky 1970).

References:

Chierchia, Gennaro, Danny Fox & Benjamin Spector. 2012. Scalar implicature as a grammatical phenomenon. In Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn & Paul Portner (eds.), Handbook of semantics, vol. 3, 2297–2331. Mouton de Gruyter.

Chomsky, Noam. 1970. Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation. In Roman Jakobson & Shigeo Kawamoto (eds.), Studies in general and oriental linguistics presented to shiro hattori on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Tokyo: TEC Co.

Fox, Danny. 2000. Economy and semantic interpretation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Hirsch, Aron. 2017. An inflexible semantics for cross-categorial operators. Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.

Meyer, Marie-Christine. 2013. Ignorance and grammar. Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.