The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Rick Nouwen (Utrech University) for our fourth talk of the quarter.

DATE: November 11, 2011
TIME: 11-1pm
PLACE: Wieboldt 130

‘On wh-exclamatives and “noteworthiness”‘

In this talk, I will present joint work with Anna Chernilovskaya on wh-exclamatives. There are two dominating approaches to the semantics of sentences. One approach claims that wh-exclamatives are degree constructions involving degree intensification of a possibly implicit degree property (see, especially, Rett (2011)). The opposing account, mainly due to Zanuttini and Portner (2003), has it that wh-exclamatives involve a mechanism of domain widening. In this paper we show that the mechanisms behind the two competing approaches are basically indistinguishable. Moreover, we point out that there is a kind of wh-exclamatives for which these approaches do not provide the expected semantics. Finally, we put forward a distinctive and crucially much simpler proposal: exclamatives directly express a noteworthiness evaluation, either of the referent associated to the wh-phrase or of the open proposition underlying the exclamative.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Geoff Nunberg (UC Berkeley).

DATE: November 4, 2011
TIME: 11-1pm
PLACE: Wieboldt 130

‘A minimal semantics for derogatives, or being mean without meaning’

Derogative terms raise two kinds of questions. The first is how they achieve their effect of conveying disdain for the members of a group and imputing to them a set of discreditable traits: how much of this follows from their lexical meanings, and how much is part of what one asserts when one uses them? My answer to these is, in brief, almost nothing. The linguistic meaning of a derogative word like redskin is pretty much exhausted by its typical dictionary definition; e.g., “redskin: (Offensive Slang) Used as a disparaging term for an American Indian.” That account generalizes to other evaluative terms. But a second question involves a property that (some) derogatives share only with vulgar descriptions, which I call universal solvency: they can arouse strong feelings in virtue of their form alone, and that potential bleeds through the operators, like quotation, that normally absolve a speaker from responsibility for their content — one can’t ever mention them. That property involves a locutionary act, not an illocutionary one, and can’t be explained by any accounts of how they come by their evaluative import (including mine).

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Anna Chernilovskaya (Chicago and Utrecht University, grad student).

‘How to express yourself: on discourse effects of wh-exclamatives’

DATE: October 28, 2011
TIME: 11-1pm
PLACE: Wieboldt 130

ABSTRACT: Wh-exclamatives, like “What a nice guy I met yesterday!”, behave in discourse differently from assertions and questions. For example, they cannot be used for answering a question, neither can they themselves be answered.  Instead, the main goal of an exclamative utterance is to convey speaker’s attitude. In this talk I will tell about my work in progress concerning discourse behaviour of wh-exclamatives. It is based on the discourse model from (Farkas and Bruce 2009). I suggest a definition of the exclamative speech act operator in the way that allows to characterise discourse properties of wh-exclamatives. I will then try to generalise the proposal to describe the effect of other expressive utterances on context.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Rachel Goodman (Chicago, graduate student) for our first talk of the year.

`Do Acquaintance Theorists Have an Attitude Problem?’

DATE: October 14, 2011
TIME: 11:30-1:30pm
PLACE: Wieboldt 130

ABSTRACT: The traditional approach to singular thought involves the idea that there is a special epistemic relation—call it *acquaintance*—that underpins all cases in which an agent entertains a singular thought. However, the behaviour of attitude ascriptions poses a problem for this view: If attitude ascriptions that relate an agent to a singular content are true only in case in which that agent entertains that content (call this the tracking assumption for attitude ascriptions), then it appears that there is little to be said in the way of a unified theoretical account of acquaintance. I argue that the lesson we ought to learn from this is not, as has been proposed, that acquaintance is a looser and more diverse phenomenon than we might have originally thought or that singular thought does not require acquaintance at all, but rather that we should reject the tracking assumption for attitude ascriptions. I argue, furthermore, that there are reasons independent of considerations concerning singular thought to think that the tracking assumption is false.