{"id":18265,"date":"2026-10-05T06:07:47","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T10:07:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=18265"},"modified":"2026-10-01T14:09:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T18:09:08","slug":"lfrg-amir-anvari-mit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2026\/10\/05\/lfrg-amir-anvari-mit\/","title":{"rendered":"LFRG - Amir Anvari (MIT)"},"content":{"rendered":"
Speaker<\/b>: Amir Anvari (MIT)<\/div>\n
Title:<\/b>\u00a0You are your own sibling (before exhaustification)\u00a0<\/div>\n
Time: <\/b>Wednesday, October 7, 1-2pm\u00a0<\/div>\n
Location:<\/b>\u00a032-D461<\/div>\n
Zoom link: <\/b>https:\/\/mit.zoom.us\/j\/<\/b><\/a>92053685079<\/b><\/a><\/div>\n
\u00a0<\/b><\/div>\n
Abstract:\u00a0<\/b><\/div>\n
A binary relation is irreflexive if it does not relate any object to itself. For example, the nouns \u0093child\u0094 and \u0093sibling\u0094 are intuited to express relations that are clearly irreflexive. Interestingly, in certain environments nouns like \u0093sibling\u0094 (\u0093roommate\u0094, \u0093colleague\u0094, \u0093neighbor\u0094, etc) act as though they are not<\/u>\u00a0irreflexive\u0097an observation that can be traced back to the 10th century linguist Abu Sa\u0092id Sirafi and was rediscovered in 20th century by Barker (1999) and in 21th century by Bassi, Chatain, Chen & Kobayashi (2021). For instance, the sentence \u0093John is the tallest of his siblings\u0094 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 \u0093sibling\u0094 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.\u00a0<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaker: Amir Anvari (MIT) Title:\u00a0You are your own sibling (before exhaustification)\u00a0 Time: Wednesday, October 7, 1-2pm\u00a0 Location:\u00a032-D461 Zoom link: https:\/\/mit.zoom.us\/j\/92053685079 \u00a0 Abstract:\u00a0 A binary relation is irreflexive if it does not relate any object to itself. For example, the nouns \u0093child\u0094 and \u0093sibling\u0094 are intuited to express relations that are clearly irreflexive. Interestingly, in certain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18265","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\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18265"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18267,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18265\/revisions\/18267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}