Author Archives: bhatt

Arregui in Semantics & Pragmatics

Anyone might but everyone won’t”, a new paper by Ana Arregui, has just been published by Semantics & Pragmatics.

https://semprag.org/index.php/sp/article/view/sp.14.10

Abstract:

This paper investigates the interaction between quantifiers and epistemic modals, focusing on the contrast between every and any. It builds on observations made in von Fintel & Iatridou 2003, who noted that quantifiers seem unable to take wide scope across an epistemic modal. The proposal at the heart of the paper is that modes of epistemic access to domains of quantification play a role in accounting for apparent restrictions on scope. The paper takes the characterization of conceptual covers in Aloni 2001 as a starting point to argue that in the context of epistemic modals, constraints on epistemic access to the domain of quantification can give rise to scope illusions.


Alex Göbel has made it to McGill!

When we last heard from Alex Göbel, he had just defended his dissertation. He has since been let into Canada to start his postdoc position at McGill with Michael Wagner. He writes from his quarantine in Montreal:

I’ll be at McGill on a Feodor Lynen Fellowship, sponsored by the Humboldt Foundation. The research project is aimed at investigating the interaction between Focus-particles – or Focus more generally – and intonation, specifically the role of pitch accents for the interpretation of ambiguous Focus-particles like ‘at least’. The idea is that ‘at least’ can be epistemic or concessive, and we want to see whether there’s a correlation between the interpretation and the type of pitch accent the Focused constituent receives. We’ll be running both production and comprehension experiments that will hopefully lead to lots of interesting implications for linguistic and psycholinguistic theory.

SENSUS at UMass, April 18-19, 2020

UMass is hosting “Sensus: Constructing meaning in Romance” on April 18-19, 2020. This is a conference on the formal semantics and pragmatics of Romance languages.

Areas: theoretical semantics and pragmatics and their interfaces with other domains, experimental methodologies, fieldwork, the study of variation and computational approaches

Venue: Integrative Learning Center at UMass Amherst (the ILC is a fully accessible building)

Invited speakers:

Luis Alonso-Ovalle
(McGill University)

Mariapaola D’Imperio
(Rutgers University)

Donka Farkas
(UC, Santa Cruz)

Organizers: Ana Arregui, María Biezma, Vincent Homer and Deniz Özy?ld?z

Event sponsored by the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures of UMass Amherst

Contact us at sensus@umass.edu

Details can be found here: http://websites.umass.edu/sensus/

Homer and Bhatt in new issue of Natural Language Semantics

A paper by Vincent Homer and Rajesh Bhatt has appeared in the Winter 2019 issue (27.4) of Natural Language Semantics. The title of the paper is “Licensing of PPI indefinites pseudoscope?

An abstract follows:

Positive Polarity indefinites (PPI indefinites), such as some in English, are licensed in simplex negative sentences as long as they take wide scope over negation. When it surfaces under a clausemate negation, some can in principle take wide scope either by movement or by some semantic mechanism; e.g., it can take pseudoscope if it is interpreted as a choice function variable. Therefore, there is some uncertainty regarding the way in which PPI indefinites get licensed: can pseudoscope suffice? In this article we show, using novel data from Hindi-Urdu and English, that pseudoscope is not sufficient, and that it is the syntactic position of PPI indefinites at LF, rather than their actual scope, which is relevant for licensing. These facts support a unified view of PPI indefinites as generalized quantifiers, and disfavor analyses where they are, or can be, interpreted as choice function variables.

 

CFP: Modal Inferences – an XPrag Workshop

Modal Inferences – an XPrag Workshop

Date: 03-Jun-2020 – 05-Jun-2020
Location: Siracusa, Italy
Contact Person: Ilaria Frana
Web Site: https://www.xprag.de/?page_id=8014

Linguistic Field(s): Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics

Call Deadline: 15-Feb-2020

Call for Papers:

On June 3rd-5th, 2020 the workshop “Modal Inferences” will be hosted by the University of Enna ”Kore” in Siracusa, Sicily, Italy.

The workshop is organized by Ilaria Frana (University of Enna), Marie-Christine Meyer (ZAS Berlin), Salvatore Pistoia-Reda (ZAS Berlin/Siena), Jacopo Romoli (Ulster University), and Uli Sauerland (ZAS Berlin).

Invited Speakers:

– Emmanuel Chemla (ENS)
– Lisa Matthewson (University of British Columbia)
– Clemens Mayr (Georg-August Universität Göttingen)
– Maribel Romero (Universität Konstanz)

The goal of the workshop is to bring together theoretical and experimental researchers in Linguistics, Psychology and Philosophy, working on deepening our understanding of modal inferences (e.g. inferences about the epistemic state of the speaker or the addressee) and how they arise in natural languages. We welcome submissions articulating empirical and theoretical issues on topics including but not limited to ignorance inferences arising from disjunctions, modified numerals and related constructions, speaker/hearer’s epistemic biases in polar questions, epistemic inferences arising from the future tense, evidentials, indefinites, discourse particles, miratives, and predicates of personal taste (full workshop description can be found here).

We welcome abstracts for 30 minutes talks (20 + 10 discussion) which address issues relevant to the workshop’s theme. Abstracts should be no longer than 2 A4 pages, with a 12 pt font and 2.5 cm/1 inch margins. The abstracts must be anonymous and not identify the authors. Authors may submit at most two abstracts, at most one of which may be single-authored. Please submit via Easychair by 15 February 2020 at the latest.

Link for online submission: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mod19

Meeting Description:

The goal of the workshop is to bring together theoretical and experimental researchers in Linguistics, Psychology and Philosophy, working on deepening our understanding of modal inferences (inferences about the epistemic state of the speaker or the addressee) and how they arise in natural languages. We welcome submissions articulating empirical and theoretical issues, including but not limited to the following areas.

Ignorance:

A variety of constructions have been associated with ignorance inferences about the speaker. Prominent among these are disjunctive statements like (i) suggesting that the speaker is ignorant as to whether Salvo is in Palermo and as to whether he is in Catania.

(i) Salvo is in Palermo or Catania.

Ignorance inferences like the above have been analysed as an implicature, arising either from pragmatic reasoning on the part of the hearer (Gazdar 1979, Sauerland 2004, Fox 2007, Pistoia-Reda 2014), or from more grammatical means (Meyer 2013, Buccola and Haida 2019, Fox 2017). Similar ignorance inferences have been observed in connection with modified numerals (see e.g. Nouwen 2010) and so-called modal indefinites (Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002, Chierchia 2006, Alonso-Ovalle and Menendez-Benito 2009, a.o.).
In recent years, the processing and acquisition profiles of ignorance inferences (Hochstein et al 2014, Dieuleveut et al 2019), as well as their interactions with presuppositions and other inferences (Gajewski and Sharvit 2009, Spector and Sudo 2017, Anvari 2018, Marty 2017), have been more and more at the centre of attention in this literature.

Bias and Evidence:

Another line of work investigating modal inferences focuses on speaker/hearer’s epistemic biases in polar questions (Ladd 1981, Büring & Gunlogson 2000; Romero & Han 2004; Krifka 2017; Domaneschi et. al. 2017, a.o.). For instance, the English negative polar question in (ii) mandatorily conveys that the speaker had a prior bias for the positive answer to the question and is posing the question with the intent of double-checking that bias in the face of counter-evidence (here provided by Salvo’s assertion) and, at the same time, challenge the addressee’s attempt to add the content of his assertion to the common ground. Recent work has shown that epistemic biases in polar questions may interact with other perspectivally centered elements, like evidentials or discourse particles (see for e.g. Bhadra 2016; Frana & Rawlins 2016; Frana & Menendez Benito 2019). In the domain of assertions, epistemic adverbs like really, Verum focus, discourse particles, focused negation in denials, have also been shown to trigger inferences on the epistemic state of the speaker with respect to the common ground (Gutzmann & Castroviejo Miró 2011; Repp 2013; Romero 2014, among many others).

(ii) Salvo: I have never been to the South of Italy.
Caterina: Didn’t you go to Sicily last year?

For each of the above areas, a number of questions remain open, including:

What is the status of these inferences, i.e., are they implicatures, presuppositions, or some other type of not-at-issue content? How do they arise?
What are the properties of the constructions and sentences associated with those inferences?
Can the inference-trigger occur in embedded contexts, and if so, what are the related constraints?
How do epistemic inferences interact with each other and other types of inferences?
What is the processing profile of those inferences and how are they acquired?

Parallel questions can be asked about epistemic inferences arising from evidentials, discourse particles, miratives, predicates of personal taste and related phenomena.

 

Tom Roeper at Wuppertal, Dortmund, and Berlin

Professor Tom Roeper has just returned from a trip to Germany which involved talks in Wuppertal, Dortmund, and Berlin.

In Wuppertal, he gave an invited talk at `The View from the Multilingual Child‘ on October 9. [Program: https://www.presse.uni-wuppertal.de/fileadmin/presse/news/2018/08/Multilingualism.pdf] Tom notes that two of the speakers at this conference [Juan Uriagareka and Pieter Muysken taught at UMass] and two others were visitors [Leah Bauke and Petra Schulz].

In Dortmund, he gave a lecture on October 11 at Dortmund University on `From Recursion to Pragmatics: Challenges to Acquisition Theory‘.

And in Berlin, Professor Roeper was at ZAS where he worked with Nadine Balbach on children’s acquisition of the presuppositional meaning of but and with Artemis Alexiadou and Kazuko Yatsushiro on the acquisition of nominalization. While in Berlin, he contacted Hristo Kyuchukov (University of Silesia) who works with refugee communities in and around Berlin and was a former visitor to our department. Professor Roeper is interested in developing experiments that will involve children growing up in these highly multilingual communities.

 


 

UMass Linguistics at NELS 49 at Cornell, October 5-7, 2018

UMass Linguistics was well represented at NELS 49 at Cornell. Cutting and pasting from the NELS website, I find:

The Reversible Core of ObjExp, Location, and Govern-Type Verbs.
Michael Wilson.
Besides Exceptives.
Ekaterina Vostrikova.
Phase Sensitive Morphology and Dependent Case.
Kimberly Johnson.
Don’t give me that attitude! Anti-De Se and Feature Matching of German D-Pronouns.
Alexander Göbel.
A secondary crossover effect in Hindi and the typology of movement.
Rajesh Bhatt and Stefan Keine.
Complementizers in Laz are attitude sensitive.
Omer Demirok, Deniz Ozyildiz and Balkiz Ozturk.
Romanian loves Me: Clitic Clusters, Ethics & Cyclic AGREE.
Rudmila-Rodica Ivan.

UMass Alum Maria Gouskova was one of the invited speakers. There were enough of us to justify a group picture.

 

UMass Linguistics at CreteLing 2018: Part 3 [Distributed Group Photos]

There was frost outside this morning. So it might be a good time to think about summer. This summer the UMass Linguistics department was very well represented at the CreteLing 2018 summer school in Rethymnou, Crete. Since there are a lot of pictures, I’ll break them into three parts. The third part is distributed group photos. It was difficult to get everyone into one picture. So there are many pictures.

In the big group picture you can see Elena Benedicto, Rajesh Bhatt, Satoshi Tomioka, Kai von Fintel, Petr Kusliy, William Quirk, Bobby Tosswill, Ede Zimmerman [partially], Caroline Fery, Winnie Lechner, Katia Vostrikova, Zahra Mirrazi, Rodica Ivan, Leah Chapman, Kyle Johnson, and Deniz Özyildiz.

 

 

UMass Linguistics at CreteLing 2018 Part 2: [Extracurricular Activities]

There was frost outside this morning. So it might be a good time to think about summer. This summer the UMass Linguistics department was very well represented at the CreteLing 2018 summer school in Rethymnou, Crete. Since there are a lot of pictures, I’ll break them into three parts. The second part is extracurricular activities.

UMass Linguistics At CreteLing 2018: Part 1 [Academics]

There was frost outside this morning. So it might be a good time to think about summer. This summer the UMass Linguistics department was very well represented at the CreteLing 2018 summer school in Rethymnou, Crete. Since there are a lot of pictures, I’ll break them into three parts. The first part is academics.

Professor Kyle Johnson taught an advanced class on multidominance and Professor Bhatt taught an introductory semantics class. Deniz Özyildiz and Katia Vostrikova were TAs. UMass alums Kai von Fintel and Winnie Lechner also taught classes. The full schedule is here: http://www.phl.uoc.gr/cssl18/index.php