Abstract:<\/strong><\/p>\nThis talk will examine the representation and processing of not-at-issue content (content conveyed by appositives, parentheticals and expressives).\u00a0\u00a0Potts (2005) characterized not-at-issue content in a multi-dimensional semantics.\u00a0\u00a0Others have proposed a unidimensional semantic account (e.g., Schlenker 2013) or a pragmatic account (e.g., Harris and Potts 2009).<\/p>\n
We will begin by establishing a puzzle concerning processing complexity.\u00a0\u00a0It is generally true that sentences that are longer or more complex are judged to be less acceptable than their shorter\/simpler counterparts.\u00a0\u00a0But if exactly the same material is added to either at issue content or not at issue content, there is a larger penalty, a larger drop in acceptability, if the material is added to the at issue portion of the sentence. The results of several experiments show this interaction of length\/complexity and at-issue status is general. After excluding\u00a0 a simple attention allocation source for the effect, we will turn to other possibilities ultimately arguing that not-at-issue content expresses a distinct speech act from that of the at issue content. Its status as a separate speech act has various ramifications including for its representation in memory and for the effects it imposes on grammatical dependencies spanning the not-at-issue content. The final part of the talk will present processing arguments concerning the nature of the relation between an appositive relative clause and its containing utterance.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We are pleased to announce that Lyn Frazier will be visiting on Friday 4\/6 \u00a0to give a colloquium talk, details below: Speaker:\u00a0Lyn Frazier\u00a0(UMass Amherst) Title: An act apart:\u00a0 Processing Not-At-Issue content Time:\u00a0Friday, April 6th, 3:30-5pm Place:\u00a032-155 Abstract: This talk will examine the representation and processing of not-at-issue content (content conveyed by appositives, parentheticals and expressives).\u00a0\u00a0Potts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10946","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\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10946"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10946\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10947,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10946\/revisions\/10947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}