{"id":1357,"date":"2010-03-08T05:02:42","date_gmt":"2010-03-08T10:02:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=1357"},"modified":"2010-03-07T12:52:13","modified_gmt":"2010-03-07T17:52:13","slug":"mit-linguistics-colloquium-312-paul-portner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2010\/03\/08\/mit-linguistics-colloquium-312-paul-portner\/","title":{"rendered":"MIT Linguistics Colloquium 3\/12 - Paul Portner"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><P>Speaker: Paul Portner (Georgetown University)<BR><br clear='none'\/>\nTime: Friday, March 12, 2010, 3:30pm-5pm<BR><br clear='none'\/>\nLocation: 32-141<BR><br clear='none'\/>\nTitle: Imperatives and the Analysis of Permission and Choice<\/P><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<P>   Despite the fact that they are sometimes seen as being canonically<br clear='none'\/>\nassociated with the function of imposing a requirement (e.g.,  ordering),<br clear='none'\/>\nimperatives can easily be used to give permission,  including free-choice<br clear='none'\/>\npermission:<\/P><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Take an apple!<\/li>\n<li>Take an apple or a pear!<\/li>\n<li>Take any piece of fruit you like!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><P>Because they are inherently directive, imperatives are likely to  prove<br clear='none'\/>\nrevealing as we seek to understand the phenomena of permission  and choice.  It<br clear='none'\/>\nis well known that imperatives can instantiate a wide  range of pragmatic<br clear='none'\/>\n&#8220;readings&#8221;, including orders, suggestions, and  requests, often without any<br clear='none'\/>\nspecial marking.  This fact suggests that the various subtypes of imperatives<br clear='none'\/>\ndiffer from one another primarily  in their interaction with context.<br clear='none'\/>\nPermission imperatives and  imperatives in free choice sentences are like other<br clear='none'\/>\nimperatives in  this regard.<\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>I will present a dynamic analysis of imperatives which are used to  give<br clear='none'\/>\npermission, including free choice permission with disjunction,  which draws<br clear='none'\/>\ncrucially on two theories:  a treatment of imperatives  which says that they<br clear='none'\/>\nhelp to impose an order on the worlds compatible  with the common ground<br clear='none'\/>\n(Portner 2004, 2007), and a semantics for disjunction based on alternatives<br clear='none'\/>\n(e.g., Alonso-Ovalle 2006).  I will  also discuss the relevance of this<br clear='none'\/>\nanalysis to our understanding of  free choice with modal sentences, though my<br clear='none'\/>\nmain point here will be  that different types of modals need to be<br clear='none'\/>\ndistinguished and studied  more carefully than they have been in the past.<\/P><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Paul Portner (Georgetown University) Time: Friday, March 12, 2010, 3:30pm-5pm Location: 32-141 Title: Imperatives and the Analysis of Permission and Choice Despite the fact that they are sometimes seen as being canonically associated with the function of imposing a requirement (e.g., ordering), imperatives can easily be used to give permission, including free-choice permission: Take [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1357"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1365,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1357\/revisions\/1365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}