{"id":11801,"date":"2019-02-04T05:58:36","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T09:58:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=11801"},"modified":"2019-02-07T11:44:04","modified_gmt":"2019-02-07T15:44:04","slug":"mit-colloquium-2-8-martina-wiltschko-ubc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2019\/02\/04\/mit-colloquium-2-8-martina-wiltschko-ubc\/","title":{"rendered":"MIT Colloquium (2\/8) - Martina Wiltschko (UBC)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Speaker:<\/strong>  Martina Wiltschko<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Title:<\/strong> How to do things with nominals. Towards a syntax of nominal speech acts<br><strong>Time:<\/strong> Friday, February 8th, 4pm-5:30pm<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Room:<\/strong> 32-155<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Abstract:&nbsp;<\/strong>Going  back to Aristotle, classic grammatical description as well as current  theories of grammar and the construction of meaning take the sentence to  be the object of investigation. In his seminal work, Austin 1962 took a  first step towards breaking with this tradition within philosophy of  language. He argued that our understanding of meaning has to be informed  by the fact that when we say things, we also do things. Different types  of sentences give rise to different speech acts such as asserting,  questioning, requesting, promising etc. and over the past sixty years,  evidence has accumulated suggesting that speech act meaning is part of  sentences, and hence part of grammatical structure. However, when we do  things with words, we do not always use sentences. For example, a  content question may be answered with a nominal phrase only (e.g., Who  wrote that essay? Penelope). And by uttering a nominal we are also doing  something. Specifically, we are attempting to identify a referent in a  manner that will enable our interlocutors to recognize them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This  leads us to postulate a novel hypothesis, namely that noun phrases  (like sentences) may be full-fledged speech acts. We refer to this as  the nominal speech act hypothesis. Specifically, we postulate that, just  like clauses, nominals are dominated by a layer of structure which  encodes pragmatic information contributing to their use-conditions. They  differ in that the speech act layer in the clausal domain establishes a  direct link between the speech-act participants and the proposition  denoted by the clause, while the speech act layer in the nominal domain  establishes a direct link between the speech-act participants and the  referent denoted by the nominal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In this \ntalk I provide empirical evidence for a dedicated nominal speech act \nlayer. Specifically, the evidence I discuss comes from i) \ncross-linguistic variation in pronominal paradigms; ii) properties of \nimpersonal pronouns; iii) properties of formality distinctions in \nnominal expressions; iv) distinctions between spatial and discourse \nfunctions of demonstratives.\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Martina Wiltschko Title: How to do things with nominals. Towards a syntax of nominal speech actsTime: Friday, February 8th, 4pm-5:30pm Room: 32-155 Abstract:&nbsp;Going back to Aristotle, classic grammatical description as well as current theories of grammar and the construction of meaning take the sentence to be the object of investigation. In his seminal work, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11801","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\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11801"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11810,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11801\/revisions\/11810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}