{"id":10469,"date":"2017-10-09T06:05:41","date_gmt":"2017-10-09T10:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=10469"},"modified":"2017-10-11T10:16:19","modified_gmt":"2017-10-11T14:16:19","slug":"benjamin-spector-at-mit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2017\/10\/09\/benjamin-spector-at-mit\/","title":{"rendered":"Benjamin Spector at MIT"},"content":{"rendered":"

Benjamin Spector<\/a> (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) will be visiting the department this week. In addition to his Colloquium talk on Friday, he will be offering a mini-course on the relationship between logical entailment and contextual knowledge. Details below:<\/p>\n

Speaker:<\/strong> Benjamin Spector (CNRS)
\n
Title:<\/strong> Understanding the interactions between contextual knowledge and logical entailment: scalar implicatures and presuppositions
\n
Time:<\/strong> Wednesday, October 11th, 12:45-2:15pm and Thursday, October 12th, 3:30-5:00 pm
\n
Place: <\/strong>32-D461 (Wed), 4-237 (Thurs)
\n
Abstract:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

I plan to revisit a number of problems\/puzzles in semantics\/pragmatics which all have to with the relationship between logical entailment and contextual knowledge. These puzzles include phenomena usually understood in terms of<\/p>\n

- Maximize Presupposition
\n- Interactions between scalar implicatures and presuppositions
\n- Blind scalar implicatures<\/p>\n

(i) Maximize Presupposition<\/p>\n

Why can’t you say “A president of the US came”? Standard answer: because you’d better say “The president of the US came”. What’s responsible for that is Maximize Presupposition.<\/p>\n

(ii) Interactions between scalar implicatures and presuppositions<\/p>\n

Relevant reading: Spector & Sudo, Presupposed ignorance and
\nexhaustification: how scalar implicatures and presuppositions interact<\/a><\/p>\n

(1) Mary is un\/aware that some of the students smoke<\/p>\n

(1) suggests that in fact not all of the students smoke. The most
\nstraightforward theories of scalar implicatures fail to predict this.<\/p>\n

(iii) Blind implicatures (Magri oddness cases)<\/p>\n

(2) Every professor gave the same grade to all of their student.
\n#Mary, who is one of the professors, gave an A to some of her students.<\/p>\n

The puzzle here is that in the context of the first sentence, the second one is equivalent to ‘Mary gave an A to all of her students’. Yet it is infelicitous, feels nearly contradictory, possibly because ‘some’ triggers a ‘not all’ inference. However, this inference is not expected if the notion of informativity used to compute scalar implicatures takes into account background knowledge: in this context, the sentence with ‘some’ is as informative as the sentence with ‘all’, so there should not be any particular pressure to use ‘all’ rather than ‘some’.<\/p>\n

Relevant reading: Giorgio Magri, Another argument for embedded scalar implicatures based on oddness in downward entailing environments<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My goal will be a) to present some of the recent literature about these topics, b) to discuss problems with current theories, c) time-permitting, whether it is possible to unify these different cases, based on on-going work by a student of mine, Amir Anvari.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Benjamin Spector (Centre national de la recherche scientifique) will be visiting the department this week. In addition to his Colloquium talk on Friday, he will be offering a mini-course on the relationship between logical entailment and contextual knowledge. Details below: Speaker: Benjamin Spector (CNRS) Title: Understanding the interactions between contextual knowledge and logical entailment: scalar […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10469"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10484,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10469\/revisions\/10484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}