nylanguageworkshop

[nylanguageworkshop]

Workshop *Wednesday,* May 14th: Philippe Schlenker, Ancestral Meanings: A Prelude to Evolutionary Animal Linguistics

Note: This workshop will be on a Wednesday.

Our speaker on Wednesday, May 14th will be Philippe Schlenker, who is Directeur de Recherche at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. Philippe will give a talk called "Ancestral Meanings: A Prelude to Evolutionary Animal Linguistics." The talk will be based on this paper, which Philippe has coauthored with Christina Pawlowitsch, Luc Arnal, Keny Chatain, Lucie Ravaux, Robin Ryder, Ambre Salis, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Léo Wang, Emmanuel Chemla.

How did the very first meaning components arise in animals? We argue that answers interact in interesting ways with data on current and ancestral animal communication systems. Using standard notions of evolutionary stability in biology, we develop a simple framework to analyze the emergence of three meaning components: individual signals, non-trivial combinations, and pragmatic principles of competition among signals. We show that for elementary signals to arise, they should have null cost, or be understood from the start. While this conclusion dovetails with the traditional idea that signals often originate in cues, i.e. informative by-products of non-communicative processes, the two scenarios (null cost vs. understanding from the start) can be distinguished in case studies involving ancestral meaning reconstruction. For non-trivial combinations of the form CC' (such as pyow-hack sequences in putty-nosed monkeys and ABC-D sequences in Japanese tits), we show that their emergence is heavily constrained because they should initially give rise to some miscommunication, as CC' could also be understood as the (trivial) combination of separate utterances C and C'. Finally, we investigate the evolution of two pragmatic principles that were posited in recent animal linguistics: the Informativity Principle and the Urgency Principle. We argue that both have a clear evolutionary path, especially if they start appearing in production, and then in comprehension. Overall, recent work in animal linguistics can be fruitfully combined with simple principles of evolutionary stability and with ancestral signal reconstruction to address in a precise fashion questions about the very first meaning operations in nature.

The workshop will take place on Wednesday, May 14th from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

Pragmatics Workshop at Rutgers next week

While we are posting, please also note that there will be a two-day Pragmatics workshop at Rutgers next Monday and Tuesday, May 12th and 13th. The speakers will include Josh Armstrong, Sam Berstler, Elisabeth Camp, Ethan Nowak, Craige Roberts, Philippe Schlenker, and Mandy Simons. Details here. If you would like to come, please register.

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Workshop Monday, May 5th: Yasutada Sudo, Specific indefinites and dynamic presuppositions

Our speaker on Monday, May 5th will be Yasutada Sudo, who is Professor of Linguistics at University College, London. Yasu will give a talk called "Specific indefinites and dynamic presuppositions"

This is an attempt to explain the exceptional scope behavior of specific indefinites in terms of 'dynamic presuppositions'—presuppositions with anaphoric content in addition to propositional content. It is also claimed that puzzling interpretive properties of 'certain' indefinites are straightforwardly explained as dynamic presuppositions with functional anaphora.

The workshop will take place on Monday, May 5th from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

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Workshop Monday, April 28th: Luca Incurvati, Imperatives and deontic modality: an inferential expressivist perspective

Our speaker on Monday, April 28th will be Luca Incurvati, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam. Luca will give a talk called "Imperatives and deontic modality: an inferential expressivist perspective"

In the first part of the talk, I will defend a non-cognitivist account of imperatives, starting from Paul Portner's idea that imperatives serve to manage speakers' to-do lists. I show that, once we recognize the multiplicity of operations that can be performed on a to-do list, the account has the resources to deal with weak uses of imperatives without postulating an additional list alongside it. In the second part of the talk, I present a logical framework which integrates weak and strong forms of assertion, rejection and imperatives. I use this framework to inferentially explain the meaning of deontic modals such as *must* in terms of imperatives. The resulting inferential expressivist account has the resources to explain performative uses of *must* and hitherto unaccounted for data about their occurrence pattern. I will end by outlining a number of outstanding issues and directions for future work.

The workshop will take place on Monday, April 28th from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

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Workshop Monday, April 21st: Seth Yalcin, The Scopelessness of Indicatives

Our speaker on Monday, April 21st will be Seth Yalcin, who is Professor of Philosophy at Berkeley. Seth will give a talk called "The Scopelessness of Indicatives"

Indicative conditional antecedents appear to be remarkably scopeless: scopeless with respect to the truth-functional connectives, scopeless with respect to epistemic modals, and scopeless with respect to each other (i.e., commutative). This pervasive scopelessness needs explaining, and is the subject of much recent work. In this paper I revisit the theory of McGee (1989), which already comes surprisingly close to delivering a simple and powerful account of all of this scopelessness. I reformulate the theory as information-sensitive, and extend it with epistemic modals. On the resulting theory, epistemic modals become in effect quantifiers over choice functions, and their scopeless interaction with indicative antecedents drops out. I give McGee's logic a new axiomatization, and show that if his Import-Export axiom is replaced with a weaker Commutativity axiom stating that indicative antecedents commute, then Import-Export can be derived. I explain how the issue of commutativity interacts with the question how to extend information-sensitive theories of the indicative to modal antecedents. Along the way I add to the collapse results of McGee (1985) and Mandelkern (2021), showing that under weak assumptions, Commutativity is in tension with Modus Ponens and (more generally) with the principle Mandelkern calls Ad Falsum. I convict Ad Falsum, and refine the case against Modus Ponens.

Seth says that the talk will be based on this paper, for those who would like a preview.

The workshop will take place on Monday, April 21st from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

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Workshop Monday, April 7th: Zhuoye Zhao, Tense as a perspective-sensitive item

Our speaker on Monday, April 7th will be Zhuoye Zhao, who is a PhD student in linguistics at NYU. Zhuoye will give a talk called "Tense as a perspective-sensitive item"

Tense is commonly treated as a deictic category. While much discussion has been devoted to the nature of its deixis, relatively little attention is paid to the nature of its deictic center. In joint work with Anastasia Tsilia (MIT), we propose that tense as a deictic category is comparable, but not identical, to indexicals, in that its interpretation depends on a parameter that has a global effect on an interpretation domain.

The proposal is primarily motivated by a ‘shift-together’ effect between tenses and the temporal adverbial then (and its cross-linguistic counterparts) that cuts across the previously-established typology of tense shift (Ogihara & Sharvit, 2012). The pattern is explained within a new theory of tense, according to which its interpretation is sensitive to a temporal perspective parameter, and tense shift happens by means of perspective shift. The new theory also accounts for a previously unnoticed difference between the often-conflated notions of a shifted present and a deleted tense.

The workshop will take place on Monday, April 7th from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

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Workshop Monday, March 31st: WooJin Chung, Comparing Conditionals Under Uncertainty

Our speaker on Monday, March 31st will be WooJin Chung, who is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Seoul National University. WooJin will give a talk called "Comparing conditionals under uncertainty"

Suppose that Adam is a risk-taker—in general a highly successful one—and Bill prefers to play it safe. You believe that the organization is highly likely to thrive under Adam's leadership, though there is still a small chance his investment could fail. On the other hand, Bill's risk-averse strategy will allow the organization to profit to some degree, but it won't be nearly as successful as in Adam's best-case—and most likely—scenario. Yet the organization will fare better than Adam's worst-case—and fairly unlikely—scenario. The following example sounds true in this context:

(1) If Adam takes the lead, the organization will be more successful than (it will be) if Bill takes the lead.

In this talk, I point out that the truth conditions of (1) do not align with the prediction of the standard quantificational view of conditionals (Kratzer 2012), coupled with extant theories on the interaction between comparatives and quantifiers (Schwarzchild & Wilkinson 2002, Heim 2006, Schwarzschild 2008, Beck 2010, among many others). I offer a working solution based on the idea that conditionals denote the degree to which the antecedent supports the consequent (Kaufmann 2005), or more generally, the expected value of the consequent given the antecedent (Chung and Mascarenhas 2023).

The workshop will take place on Monday, March 31st from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

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Workshop Monday, March 17th: Tomasz Zyglewicz, 'Think' as an evidential

Our speaker on Monday, March 17th will be Tomasz Zyglewicz, who is Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the University of Chicago Society of Fellows and a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities Collegiate Division. Tomasz will give a talk called "'Think' as an evidential"

One function of belief reports is explanatory: to make sense of the ascribee’s behavior. Another function is informational: to convey information about the world external to the ascribee. It’s commonly assumed that the explanatory function is more basic. In this paper, I argue that informational function is more basic. My argument rests on a novel analysis of the so-called ultra-liberal belief reports (Blumberg & Holguín, 2018). I argue, contra a recent dispositionalist analysis (Blumberg & Lederman, 2021), that their function is to cite the ascribee as the source of evidence about the prejacent. One crucial advantage of my view is that it explains restrictions on permissible ultra-liberal reports without positing arbitrary contextual parameters. Next, I go a step further and suggest that the default—if not the only—meaning of ‘think’ is evidential.

The workshop will take place on Monday, March 17th from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

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Workshop Cancelled on Monday, March 10th

Unfortunately, Bernhard Nickel has had to cancel his talk on Monday due to illness. We will try to reschedule him for the fall.

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Workshop Monday, March 3rd: Melissa Fusco, Accuracy Meets Semantics

Our speaker on Monday, March 3rd will be Melissa Fusco, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Columbia. Melissa will give a talk called "Accuracy meets Semantics"

Imaging (Lewis, 1976), based on Stalnaker’s selection function semantics for the subjunctive conditional, can be treated as a recipe for update (Gärdenfors, 1982; Katsuno & Mendelzon, 1992). Conditioning, the thought goes, is the epistemically correct response to learning A, while imaging is the epistemically correct response to making A the case. On this view, updating by imaging is a genuine epistemic rival to Conditionalization.

Of course, to be a genuine rival is one thing; to be a viable rival is quite another. Updating by imaging might seem like a born loser: incompatible, inter alia, with the well-known result that conditionalization is the only update rule that maximizes accuracy (Greaves & Wallace, 2006).

In this talk, I first explain why there are nontrivial semantic presuppositions at work in the accuracy literature. For example, update rules are scored according to the size of the gap between the posterior they recommend for each atomic p and V(p), the “vindicated” truth about p. In most frameworks, the vindicated truth about p is settled by an index consisting of a possible world.

An alternative is vindication relative to a probability function (Hajek, 2010; Pettigrew, 2012). Adding probability functions to the index opens up the possibility of a novel notion of vindication—one which, following the tradition of dynamic semantics, I will call dynamic vindication (Veltman, 1996).

In the second part of the talk, I argue that by employing dynamic vindication, we can take steps towards an argument that Imaging beats Conditionalization, on accuracy-maximizing grounds, in some contexts of choice. My argument is compatible with conditionalization’s superiority in the observational case.

The workshop will take place on Monday, March 3rd from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

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Workshop Monday, February 24th: Matt Mandelkern, Hallelujah ‘Junction: Strange interactions of conditionals and connectives

Our speaker on Monday, February 24th will be Matt Mandelkern, who is an Associate Professor at NYU. Matt will give a talk called "Hallelujah ‘Junction: Strange interactions of conditionals and connectives"

We explore two puzzling phenomena involving the interaction of conditionals, disjunction, and conjunction. The first is Simplification of Disjunctive Antecedents (SDA), the inference from 'if p or q, r' to 'if p, r and if q, r', which often, but not always, appears valid. The second is the observation of McDermott 1996 that certain conjunctions and disjunctions of conditionals are, strangely, interpreted as being equivalent to each other: thus 'If the die lands even, it will land two, and if the die lands odd, it will land three', and likewise 'If the die lands even, it will land two, or if the die lands odd, it will land three', both have prominent readings where they are true just in case the die lands two or three, and false otherwise. We develop a unified account of these phenomena, based on the role of the contextual accessibility relation for conditionals. Not only does this account explain both phenomena in a conservative way, but it improves on extant accounts in a number of ways: it extends immediately to the wide-scope version of SDA, and it captures subjunctive versions of McDermott's cases. Joint work with Snow Zhang (Berkeley).

The workshop will take place on Monday, February 24th from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

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Tomorrow's workshop cancelled

Unfortunately, tomorrow's talk by Gabe Greenberg (on Monday, February 10th) is cancelled due to illness. We will try to reschedule for later date.

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[Cancelled] Workshop Monday, February 10th: Gabriel Greenberg, Iconic, Symbolic, and Recursive Semantics

<b>Unfortunately, this talk has had to be canceled due to illness. We will do our best to reschedule it at another time.</b>

Our speaker on Monday, February 10th will be Gabriel Greenberg, who is Associate Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. Gabe will give a talk called "Iconic, Symbolic, and Recursive Semantics":

This talk aims to situate natural language within the broad geography of representational systems. I’ll argue that spoken languages are based on semantic rules that are (for the most part) both symbolic and recursive, in contrast with purely iconic rules and with non-recursive symbolic rules. I then examine the distribution of productivity across these representational kinds. It turns out that productivity is not unique to language, though recursion appears to be the only way for symbolic systems to achieve the unlimited productivity over structural forms that natural languages afford.

The workshop will take place on Monday, February 10th from 6 until 8pm in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this academic year, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

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Workshop Monday, February 3rd: Friederike Moltmann, The Semantics of Predicates of Completion-related Absence

Our speaker on Monday, February 3rd will be Friederike Moltmann, who is a Research Director at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique. Friederike will give a talk called "The Semantics of Predicates of Completion-related Absence"

In this talk, I will develop a semantic analysis of completion-related predicates of absence such as 'lack' and 'be missing' in English. The analysis is based on the notion of a conceptual (integrated or ideal) whole, the notion of a variable object and its variable parts, and an ontology of 'lacks' as entities whose satisfaction involves parts of wholes or else situations obtained from them. The semantic analysis gives support for truthmaker semantics applied to satisfiable objects (object-based truthmaker semantics) as well as for a mereological view of wholes being prior to parts.

The workshop will take place on Monday, February 3rd from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this academic year, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

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Spring 2025 Lineup

During Spring 2025, we'll meet on Mondays, 6–8pm, in room 302 of NYU's philosophy building (5 Washington Place). Here is our lineup:

February 3rd Friederike Moltmann (CNRS)

February 10th Gabe Greenberg (UCLA)

February 17th (no workshop)

February 24th Matt Mandelkern (NYU)

March 3rd Melissa Fusco (Columbia)

March 10th Zhouye Zhao (NYU)

March 17th Tomasz Zyglewicz (U Chicago)

March 24th (no workshop)

March 31st WooJin Chung (Seoul)

April 7th Kate Stanton (Pitt)

April 14th (no workshop)

April 21st Seth Yalcin (Berkeley)

April 28th Luca Incurvati (ILLC, Amsterdam)

May 5th Yasu Sudo (UCL)

May 14th (Wednesday) Philippe Schlenker (ENS/NYU)

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this academic year, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard. Note that if you have previously RSVPed for at least one talk during Fall, 2024, you are already approved to attend.

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Workshop Monday, December 9th: Torsten Odland: Counting Many as One: the Ontological Insignificance of Grammatical Number

Our speaker on Monday, December 9th will be Torsten Odland (UCLA, CSU, Long Beach). Torsten will give a talk called "Counting Many as One: the Ontological Insignificance of Grammatical Number"

Are there objects that are both one F and many Gs? (Say, one pile and many grains of sand?) The suggestion that there are—call it the One-Many Thesis—has been endorsed by many philosophers, from Plato to Frege. However, on standard developments of Plural Logic, the One-Many Thesis appears to be logically false, since its natural formalization contradicts the axioms governing the logical constant inclusion (“is one of”). I respond to this objection and argue that the One-Many Thesis should not rejected on purely logical or semantic grounds. I develop a semantics for numeral noun constructions, following Krifka 1995, according to which counting is always relative to a principle of individuation supplied by the content of a noun. According to such a semantics, distinctions of grammatical number need not reflect any distinction in what is represented and the One-Many Thesis can be true.

The workshop will take place on Monday, December 9th from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

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Workshop Monday, December 2nd: Craige Roberts, Attitudes de re: Semantics and dynamic pragmatics

Our speaker on Monday, December 2nd will be Craige Roberts, who is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at Ohio State . Craige will give a talk called "Attitudes de re: Semantics and dynamic pragmatics"

I argue that de re attitude attributions arise quite regularly as a result of two types of presuppositions associated with utterances wherein an NP which is definite (pronoun, definite or demonstrative description, or proper name) or a specific indefinite occurs in the complement of an attitude predicate or some other doxastic intensional context. The first (cf. Maier 2019) is an anaphoric presupposition triggered by the use of the definite NP (Heim 1982,1983,1992) or specific indefinite (Kratzer 1998). Though the NP remains in situ in the embedded clause, non- local satisfaction of this presupposition results in truth conditional effects akin to those that would result from giving the NP semantic wide scope over the attitude: presuppositionally triggered wide pseudo-scope. In the resulting interpretation, the triggering NP’s contribution to semantic content is simply the res which is the actual denotation of its wider scope antecedent, yielding interpretation de re without syntactically unmotivated NP movement at LF (Keshet & Schwarz 2019) or structured propositions (von Stechow & Cresswell 1982). The second presupposition is a background implication entailed by any de re attitude attribution: Epistemically limited humans can never know a res directly or completely, but only under some limited guise or other. So an agent can only hold an attitude toward a res under some guise reflecting their acquaintance. This captures the acquaintance requirement of Kaplan (1986), but here arises as the reflection of an ontological precondition on the existence of a de re attitude, a non-anaphoric presupposition (Roberts & Simons 2024). Thus, acquaintance under a guise is an entailment of the triggering attitude in conjunction with the wide pseudo-scope of the target NP, arising from our world knowledge of the corresponding type of situation. To model it, there is no need to stipulate silent existential operators or concept generators at LF, avoiding Lederman’s (2021) problems for Percus & Sauerland (2003).

This account is straightforwardly realized using independently motivated tools in a dynamic pragmatics: presuppositionally triggered pseudo-scope for definites (including names), and the notion of presuppositional background content. Drawing on Aloní (2001), the notion of a guise is modeled as an individual concept in a conceptual cover, thereby inheriting her account’s advantages over previous accounts of the de re. In a de re attribution, the nature of the guise under which the agent is acquainted with the res is not semantically specified; the semantic content of the attitude report merely entails that there is some counterpart relation that maps the actual res to entities in the agent’s belief worlds which have the properties predicated of the embedded definite NP. But the nature of the entailed guise is often pragmatically evident from context, or even explicitly given by an appositive (Soames 2002). When this is the case, we can contextually enrich the meaning of the utterance by adding the presumption that the entailed guise of acquaintance is the particular contextually retrieved guise. Unlike with Aloní’s perspective shifting operator ℘ or Stalnaker’s (1979) diagonalization, on the present account we needn’t shift the NP’s semantic interpretation (Gluer & Pagin 2006,2012); context merely pragmatically enriches that interpretation to make the presupposed guise more specific.

All this sheds new light on a number of classic problems pertaining to the de re (Frege 1892; Quine 1956,1961; Geach 1967, etc.). Moreover, with the addition of centered worlds (Lewis 1979), the theory straightforwardly extends to account for de se interpretations, while avoiding problems of the de se, pointed out by Ninan (2016), for the classical doctrine of propositions.

The workshop will take place on Monday, December 2nd from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.

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Workshop Monday, November 25th: Christian De Leon: The Attributive Use Revisited

Our speaker on Monday, November 25th will be Christian De Leon, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Iceland and a Visiting Scholar at University College Dublin. Christian will give a talk called "The Attributive Use Revisited"

Abstract: Donnellan (1966) famously argued for a distinction between two uses of definite descriptions: the referential and the attributive. Though the distinction is now generally thought to wrongly cross-cut the semantics/pragmatics boundary, an explanation is still needed of why some definite descriptions seem "essential". For example, (1) but not (2) seems to provide insight into the speaker’s background beliefs:

(1) The person drinking a martini has excellent taste in beverages.

(2) Th person drinking a martini has excellent taste in clothing.

I’ll argue that, contrary to initial impressions, the suggestions in cases like (1) do not arise from a Relevance or Manner Implicature. Instead, they’re owed to a more general process of establishing clause-internal coherence (Hobbs 2010). This analysis has theoretical utility because it explains classic data without requiring that distinct pragmatic mechanisms be at work in (1) and (2). Whereas other theories must predict that a unique process is triggered by the predicate in (1), on my view, the same pragmatic process is at work in both sentences: a search for a coherent connection between a presupposition and surrounding discourse.

The workshop will take place on Monday, November 25th from 6 until 8pm (Eastern Time) in room 202 of NYU's Philosophy Building (5 Washington Place).

RSVP: If you don't have an NYU ID, and if you haven't RSVPed for a workshop yet during this semester, please RSVP no later than 10am on the day of the talk by emailing your name and email address to Jack Mikuszewski at jhm378@nyu.edu. This is required by NYU in order to access the building. When you arrive, please be prepared to show government ID to the security guard.