s=?iso-8859-1?Q?=E9minaires_?=Kazuko Yatsushiro et Uli Sauerland (ZAS) au LLING

[Hamida Demirdache hamida.demirdache@univ-nantes.fr [parislinguists]]

Le Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes (LLING)

a le plaisir d’accueillir

 

Kazuko Yatsushiro et Uli Sauerland

(ZAS, Center for General Linguistics, Berlin)

 

Pour une série de séminaires du lundi 26 au mercredi 28 mai, ouverts à tous.

 

Les séminaires se tiendront au LLING, salle 3014 du bâtiment Censive du campus Lettres et Sciences Humaines de l'Université de Nantes (arrêt de tram Facultés).

 

Lundi 26 mais 10h 30

Uli Sauerland

Rescale: Language is Fuzzier than Fuzzy Logic
 
Fuzzy Logic has been regarded as unsuitable for linguistic semantics since work by Kamp and Fine in the 1970s. In recent work, though, formal systems very similar to fuzzy logic have been explored by a number of researchers in the field (e.g. Lasersohn 1999, Language).  In the paper, we argue for a semantics of natural language based on fuzzy logic, but enriched by an operation we call `Rescale'. Rescaling of predicate is a way of making sure that the predicate assigns a broad range of truth values between 0 and 1 to the entities in its domain.  We argue that both the restriction of adjectives as in `tall for a jockey' and local contradictions as in `tall and not tall' should be analyzed using rescaling.  We furthermore argue that rescaling should apply recursively, and thereby is primarily a part of sentence semantics, not pragmatics.  We also present a Rescale based account of Gajewski's (2008) `ungrammatical contradictions'.

Mardi 27 mai 10h30

Uli Sauerland

Bound Pronouns: Form and Interpretation
 
Three prominent cases of a mismatch between pronominal form and interpretation involve binding: de se binding, distributive binding, and binding under a focus operator. I first argue that the three phenomena share several properties, especially that they all extend to Condition A cases.  I then propose to capture the three phenomena within an account that involves a pair representation.  Finally, I consider remaining differences between the three cases, and offer an explanation within my account.

 

Mardi 27 mai 14h00

Kazuko Yatsushiro

When children are more pragmatic than adults

Recent studies show that children are less sensitive to pragmatic infelicity than adults (Noveck 2001, Trueswell 1999, Bott and Noveck 2004, among others). In this paper, we show that children are more pragmatic than adults in certain condition. We report results from an experiment that tested children's production of relative clauses, such as the following:
 
(1)        a. Das Mädchen, das der Papa geküsst hat
       the girl       who the father kissed has
       'the girl who the father kissed'
       b. Das Mädchen, das den Papa geküsst hat
       the girl        who the father kissed  has
       'the girl who kissed the father'
 
It has been observed that object relatives are more difficult to process for adults, and that children acquire them later than subject relatives. Both children and adults produce passives as in (2), instead of (1a). Children, though not adults, seem to make a distinction between contexts more appropriate for the production of long passives with von-phrase (by-phrase) from those for short passives.
 
(2)       Das Mädchen, das von dem Papa geküsst wird
          the girl   that by the father kissed become
`the girl who is (being) kissed by the father.'

 

Mercredi 28 mai 10h30

Uli Sauerland

More Conservative than They Look: Determiner to Adverb LF-Conversion in German
 
Proportional determiner quantifiers in German allow interpretations that violate the conservativity universal of Keenan & Stavi (1984, Linguistics and Philosophy). I argue for an analysis that distinguishes between surface syntax and the logical form of sentences. I show that in surface syntax, German non-conservative quantifiers are determiners that form a constituent with a noun phrase and share case and agreement properties with the noun phrase. But I propose that at logical form the non-conservative determiners undergo an adverbialization movement and are interpreted by a mechanism that generalizes focus- affected quantification of Herburger (2000, MIT Press). This result refines the understanding of conservativity as a constraint on interpretation.
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