Whamit!

Speaker: Amir Anvari (MIT)

Title: You are your own sibling (before exhaustification) 

Time: Wednesday, October 7, 1-2pm 

Location: 32-D461

A binary relation is irreflexive if it does not relate any object to itself. For example, the nouns “child” and “sibling” are intuited to express relations that are clearly irreflexive. Interestingly, in certain environments nouns like “sibling” (“roommate”, “colleague”, “neighbor”, etc) act as though they are not irreflexive—an observation that can be traced back to the 10th century linguist Abu Sa’id Sirafi and was rediscovered in 20th century by Barker (1999) and in 21th century by Bassi, Chatain, Chen & Kobayashi (2021). For instance, the sentence “John is the tallest of his siblings” sounds perfectly coherent despite the fact that, on standard assumptions, it presupposes that John is one of his own siblings (compare with: #John is the tallest of his children). Inspired by Paille’s (2025) treatment of the exclusivity inference of co-taxonyms, I will argue that (i) nouns like “sibling” do not, in fact, express irreflexive relations as a matter of their lexical semantics and (ii) the intuition that they do so is due to exhaustification at LF with the identity predicate IDENT acting as the negated alternative.