BUSINESS MEETING: FRIDAY 11.30-12.30 EST on ZOOM. zoom info here
We expect presentations to take place in person in marsh auditorium, yale science building
see map.
Please consult the current COVID policy at Yale for specific guidance -
if you are spending less than four days on campus you have to do nothing
; if you are spending four or more days on campus, you must fill out this form, filling in "Yale" as vendor and "veneeta.dayal@yale.edu" for host
this is the final program; please continue to check for possible minor revisions
information
here. We regret that we cannot entertain questions from Zoom participants,
but we will provide information about slack soon
Friday, May 12 program pdf
| 8.30 – 9 | breakfast & registration | |
| 9 – 9.30 | welcome & opening remarks | |
| Tamar Szabó Gendler dean – Yale Faculty of Arts & Sciences |
Raffaella Zanuttini chair – Yale Linguistics |
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| invited talk α chair – Veneeta Dayal | ||
| 9.30 – 10.30 | Referring & quantifying without nominals: headless relative clauses across languages
Reference to and quantification over individuals were identified early on as semantic properties of nominals—broadly understood as varieties of DPs/NPs with or without different kinds of D(eterminer) heads. More than fifty years ago, Montague showed us an elegant, unified treatment of referential and quantificational DPs/NPs by means of generalized quantifiers. A few years later, the referential and quantification properties of bare nominals—nominals without a D—started being investigated, in seminal work by Carlson, and then Chierchia and Dayal, who added a crucial crosslinguistic dimension. Besides nominals, there is at least one other family of constructions—largely understudied—that are capable of referring to and quantifying over individuals, albeit having no morphosyntactic resemblance to nominals: Headless Relative Clauses. They are embedded full clauses with a missing constituent but no nominal head, unlike headed relative clauses. In this talk, I define varieties of Headless Relative Clauses across languages and sketch a syntactic/semantic analysis for each variety, building on Jacobson’s and Dayal’s work on free relative clauses and Dayal’s and von Fintel’s work on free choice free relatives. In doing so, I highlight similarities and differences with the semantic behavior and the syntax/semantics interface of nominals, exploring what core semantic rules the two families of constructions share. Last, I hope to provide what is needed for those who want to study Headless Relative Clauses in whatever language they choose from whichever linguistic corner they prefer, starting with this very sentence, which contains 4 examples total of 3 different kinds of Headless Relative Clauses.
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Ivano Caponigro UC San Diego |
| session 1 | ||
| 10.30 – 11.10 | Movement & interpretation of quantifiers in internally-headed relative clauseshandout | Rebecca Jarvis |
| 11.10 – 11.30 | coffee break | |
| SALT(ED) semantic theory & language revitalization moderator – Robert Henderson |
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| 11.30 – 1 |
panel. Jeremy Johns [slides] Masha Polinsky [slides] Liliana Sánchez Janett Vengoa [slides] | |
| 1 – 2.30 | Lunch | (on your own!) local information |
| session 2 chair – Kai von Fintel | ||
| 2.30 – 3.10 | Simplifying the evidential condition on asking polar questionshandout | Daniel Goodhue |
| 3.10 – 3.50 | Contextual bias anti-licenses NPIs in polar questionsslides | Tuệ Trịnh |
| 3.50 – 4.30 | Two kinds of question-embedding strategies & veridicality alternations slides | Deniz Özyıldız & Wataru Uegaki |
| 4.30 – 4.50 | coffee break | |
| session 3 chair – Bob Frank | ||
| 4.50 – 5.30 | Weakening is external to 'only' handout | Luis Alonso-Ovalle & Aaron Hirsh |
| invited talk β | ||
| 5.30 – 6.30 | In this talk, I will discuss new work from my lab which attempts to describe the “algorithms” that neural networks (NNs) implement implicitly, as a result of their training. I will focus specifically on NNs ability to encode abstract, compositional functions which consist of interpretable subroutines and which operate in a content-independent manner. I will discuss findings on models trained from scratch on language and vision tasks, as well as large language models (LLMs) in an in-context-learning setting.Mechanisms for compositionality in neural networks
Ellie Pavlick |
Brown University |
Saturday, May 13program pdf
| 8.30 – 9 | Breakfast | |
| invited talk γ chair – Maria Pinango | ||
| 9 – 10 | Meaning in contactslides
In contexts of language contact, we can observe dynamic patterns of semantic and pragmatic variation and change that pose interesting challenges for linguistic theory. Traditionally, structural approaches to linguistic architecture have been based on idealisations positing homogeneity and stability. This has been changing to a more inclusive perspective that also takes into account variability and crosslinguistic interactions and has a stronger empirical grounding in speakers’ linguistic practices and competences. What has remained unchanged, however, is an underlying assumption of distinct, bounded languages. As modern sociolinguistics has shown, this is a social construct based on European nation-state building and colonialism that cannot capture the fluidity and dynamics of language in settings of linguistic diversity. I propose a linguistic architecture that takes this in to account and is based on ‘com-sits’, representations of communicative situations that serve as an organising domain for linguistic structure and make bounded languages optional. Crucially, such an architecture can account for the dynamics of meaning in contact: drawing on evidence from different contact-linguistic settings, I show that com-sits can generate semantic structure even in the absence of bounded ‘languages’, and analyse their impact on propositional semantics, coercion and semantic transfer, pragmatic enrichment, social meaning, and nonverbal conceptual structure.
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Heike Wiese
Humboldt-University Berlin |
| Session 4 | ||
| 10 – 10.40 | The role of intonation & context in lack of necessity meanings in child Romanianslides | Adina Camelia Bleotu, Anton Benz & Gabriela Brozbǎ |
| 10.40 – 11:20 | Counterfactuals (not) under discussion slides | Sonia Ramotowska, Paul Marty, Jacopo Romoli & Paolo Santorio |
| 11.20 – 11.40 | coffee break | |
| Session 5 chair – Elena Herburger | ||
| 11.40 – 12:20 | Different roads to verumslides | Noa Bassel |
| poster session a | ||
| 12.20 – 1 | lightning round a | |
| 1 – 2 | Lunch and pop-up mentoring | pizza & salad outside! |
| poster session b | ||
| 2 – 2.40 | lightning round b | |
| session 6 chair – Cécile Meier | ||
| 2.40 – 3.20 | Everyone except possibly Ann
slides |
Clemens Mayr & Ekaterina Vostrikova |
| 3.20 – 3.40 | coffee break | |
| session 7 chair – Anamaria Falauş | ||
| 3.40 – 4.20 | Underspecified degree operators compare correlatesslides | Ang Li |
| 4.20 – 5 | Trivalent Exh & the Exclusion theory of summative predicateshandout | Mathieu Paillé |
| 5 – 6 | Break/transport to Marcel Hotel
[map here!]
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| conference dinner: 6 pm – 10.30 pm | ||
| 6.15 – 7 | poster session a |
cash bar hors d’œuvres |
| 7 – 7.45 | poster session b | |
| 8 – 9.30 | dinner | |
| 9.30 – 10.30 | dessert & dancing | |
Sunday, May 14 program pdf
| 8.30 – 9 | Breakfast | |
| invited talk δ chair – Zoltán Szabó | ||
| 9 – 10 | Kinds, properties & atelicity slides |
Gennaro Chierchia Harvard University |
| session 8 | ||
| 10 – 10.40 | Are there "weak definites" in bare classifier languages? slides |
Ka-Fai Yip, Ushasi Banerjee & Margaret Chui Yi Lee |
| 10.40 – 11.20 | Event-internal/external quantification & the mereotopology of eventsslides | Marcin Wągiel |
| 11.20 – 11.40 | coffee break | |
| session 9 chair – Chris Barker | ||
| 11.40 – 12.20 | Perspectival biscuitshandout | Karl Mulligan & Kyle Rawlins |
| invited talk ε | ||
| 12.20 – 1.20 | Arguments, conditionals & contextArguments (i.e., constructions of the form “P. Therefore, Q”; or“Suppose P. Then, Q”) and conditionals (i.e., “If P then Q”) are powerful means language provides us to reason about possibilities and to reach conclusions from premises. These two kinds of constructions exhibit several affinities—e.g. they both come in different varieties depending on the mood, they share some of the same connectives (i.e., “then”), they allow for similar patterns of modal subordination. In the light of these affinities, it is not surprising that prominent semantic theories of conditionals—dynamic and new suppositionalist accounts—tend to assimilate conditionals and arguments. In this talk, I shall marshall neglected linguistic evidence as well as some theoretical considerations for thinking that, despite these similarities, arguments and conditionals should be given a different semantics and I lay out a framework that can capture their affinities while accounting for their outstanding differences. A crucial piece of the puzzle is that, in order to model the distinctive dynamics of argumentative discourse, context ought to be thought of as having a distinctive hierarchical structure.
handout |
Carlotta Pavese Cornell University |
| end of main session business meeting on Zoom: Friday 19 May 11.30–12.30 est Info | ||
philosophy of linguisticsworkshop begins 3pm
all posters —
| Luis Alonso-Ovalle & Bernhard Schwarz | Structural ambiguity in pseudo-partitives: the case of quantity nouns |
| Johanna Alstott | Ordinal Numbers: Not Superlatives, but Modifiers of Superlatives |
| Helena Aparicio & Eszter Ronai | Scalar implicature rates vary within & across adjectival scales |
| Ido Benbaji | Is nothing irreplaceable? A substitution theory of de re |
| Omri Doron | Another look at the Mapping Hypothesis: evidence from Hebrew |
| Patrick Elliott | Disjunctive donkeys & overlapping updates |
| Nicholas Fleisher | Semifactives in Comparatives |
| Alexander Göbel & Eszter Ronai | On the meaning of intonational contours: a view from scalar inference |
| Leopold Hess, Corien Bary & Bob van Tiel | Commitments de lingua & assertoric commitments: the case of expressives |
| Elsi Kaiser & Haley Hsu | On the perceived generalizability vs. specificity of subjective predicates: Both linguistic factors & non-linguistic individual differences are at play |
| Alexandros Kalomoiros | An approach to Hurford Conditionals |
| Angelika Kiss, Rebecca Tollan & Daphna Heller | Structural iconicity predicts word order in improvised gestures |
| Jianan Liu, Shravani Patil, Hagay Schurr, Daria Seres, Olga Borik & Bert Le Bruyn | The theory of argument formation: between kinds & properties |
| Mary Moroney | More exceedingly comparative: Adverbial & attributive Exceed comparatives |
| Takanobu Nakamura | Partial plurality anti-presupposition & local satisfaction |
| Kyle Rawlins | Deriving the evidence asymmetry in positive polar questions |
| Aynat Rubinstein & Elena Herburger | From temporal to concessive meanings: a semantic analysis of 'still' |
| Ankana Saha, Yağmur Sağ & Kathryn Davidson | Focus on demonstratives: Experiments in English & Turkish |
| Giorgio Sbardolini | Homogeneity & the Illocutionary Force of Rejection |
| Yash Sinha | Number morphology in Hindi coordinative compounds |
| Stephanie Solt | Not very easy: towards the unification of scalar implicature & understatement |
| Marcin Wągiel & Natalia Shlikhutka | Pluralities vs. clusters: A view from Ukrainian singulatives |
| Will Wegner, Josh Phillips & Claire Bowern | On the emergence of an aspectual NPI: comparative polysemy & the case of Diyari marla |
| Yusuke Yagi | Telescope of Incremental Quantification |
| Yichi (Raven) Zhang | On the Modeling of Live Possibilities |