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« Evidentials Grant Group Meeting | Main | Special Lecture on Infinities»

Partee-Borschev NSF Grant Meeting

The Partee-Borschev NSF Grant Group will have a number of open meetings this semester for project participants and anyone else who is interested to discuss project research and topics that are related to the project.

The first meeting will be held Wednesday October 4, 5:30-7:30 pm (with some sort of food included, TBA, suggestions welcome), in the Partee room. Everyone is welcome!

Agenda

Anna Verbuk will give a practice talk of her upcoming 20-minute paper for WECOL, 'The acquisition of the Russian or'.

Brief abstract: In languages such as English and German, the disjunction operator is interpreted inclusively under the scope of negation. In languages such as Russian and Hungarian, the disjunction operator is interpreted exclusively under the scope of negation because it is a PPI (Szabolcsi 2002). I discuss an experiment that I did on the acquisition of the Russian "or." Russian-speaking children start out by going through the "English" stage where they interpret the Russian "or" inclusively when clausemate negation is present. I argue that the default setting of the PPI parameter is {-PPI}, and propose a trigger for changing the initial setting of the parameter to the Russian {+PPI} setting.

Barbara Partee will present a paper currently under final revision for a volume resulting from an Aspect conference organized by Susan Rothstein in Tel Avis in June 2005; the title is "Negation, Intensionality, and Aspect: Interaction with NP Semantics", and a draft is available here.

Brief abstract: This paper is about the interaction of the meanings of Noun Phrases (NPs) and various operator-like elements that a sentence may contain: negation, intensional verbs (want, expect,hope for, seek), tenses, modal verbs, aspectual operators, and other elements. I focus mainly on negation and intensionality, with discussion of aspect-related problems at the end. The patterns of interaction of NPs and various operator-like elements sometimes show negation and intensional operators patterning alike, sometimes differently. Negation is not an intensional operator; so the question arises why it sometimes, but not always, patterns with the intensional operators.

The Russian "genitive of negation" construction seems to lump negation and some intensional verbs together. We review hypotheses about interactions among scope, NP interpretation, and the semantic properties of negation and intensional operators. Then we add aspect to the picture, drawing on recent works by Paul Kiparsky and by Dmitry Levinson. After challenging some appealing but questionable claims by Kiparsky (Kiparsky 1998) about parallels between partitive case in Finnish and imperfective aspect in Russian, I adapt some arguments from Dmitry Levinson's work (this and this) on a slightly different kind of parallel between imperfectivity and genitive case under negation, to further support the idea of similarity between NPI contexts and intensional contexts. In the concluding section I opt for a view of "family resemblance" properties that many but not all instances of negation and intensionality share, so as to allow for equally important differences that show up among the family members.

Discussion of plans for future meetings. We will have presentations in the future at least by Florian, Keir, Amy Rose, and Aynat, some additional presentations by Barbara and/or Volodja, and we would be glad to have volunteers for additional presentations. This can be an additional venue for practice talks, for instance. Let Barbara know if you'd like to present something.

[Thanks Florian!]

September 28, 2006 12:11 AM | 04:23 (2006-09-28) , grants