GENIUS: G énéricité Séminaire- Marcelo Ferreira 11 février

[Fabio.Del.Prete at ENS.FR]

Chers collègues,

dans le cadre du séminaire de l'ANR "GENIUS: Genericity: Interpretation and
Uses", nous avons le plaisir de vous convier à la prochaine conférence:

Marcelo Ferreira (Universidade de São Paulo, Departamento de Lingüística)
"Habituals and Plural Events"

qui aura lieu le

jeudi 11 février
à l'ENS
29 rue d'Ulm
Pavillon Jardin
Salle de réunions - RdC

Resumé:

In this talk, I explore the idea that the logical representation of certain
habitual sentences involve quantification/reference to plural events (see
Kratzer 2004). It has two parts:

In the fist part, I contrast the semantics and pragmatics of habitual sentences
with and without adverbs of quantification, as exemplified in (1):

(1) a. When Mary visits John, he always/usually cries.
    b. When Mary visits John, he cries.

I claim that whereas a quantificational analysis is adequate for the ones with
Q-adverbs, with the adverbs being the counterpart of `every', `most' and so on,
the ones without them (which I call `Bare Habituals') should be analyzed as
involving plural definite descriptions of events.

In the second part, I discuss continuous and habitual readings of imperfective
sentences such as those in (2):

(2) a. Mary is dying her hair (right now).
    b. Mary dyes her hair.

I argue that continuous and habitual readings share the same temporal and the
same modal ingredients. I assume the presence of an existential/indefinite
event determiner in both sentences and argue that the only difference between
the logical representations of (2a) and (2b) is the number (singular/plural)
of the event variables being quantified over. Continuous readings involve
quantification over singular events, whereas habitual readings involve
quantification over plural events. I also claim that cross-linguistic variation
within the domain of imperfectivity reduces to selectional number requirements
of an event determiner.
http://lumiere.ens.fr/~amari/genius/Seminar.htm

Bien cordialement,

Fabio Del Prete, pour les membres du groupe "Généricité"

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