{"id":694,"date":"2009-04-13T05:01:12","date_gmt":"2009-04-13T09:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=694"},"modified":"2009-04-13T15:00:16","modified_gmt":"2009-04-13T19:00:16","slug":"ling-lunch-416-guillaume-thomas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2009\/04\/13\/ling-lunch-416-guillaume-thomas\/","title":{"rendered":"Ling Lunch - 4\/16 - Guillaume Thomas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Guillaume Thomas<BR><br clear='none'\/>\nTitle: Incremental comparatives<BR><br clear='none'\/>\nTime: Thurs 4\/16, 12:30-1:45<BR><br clear='none'\/>\nPlace: <a href=\"http:\/\/whereis.mit.edu\/map-jpg?mapterms=32-D461\">32-D461<\/a><BR><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<P>In this talk I will investigate a form of comparison of superiority that one<br clear='none'\/>\ncould call `incremental&apos;, as in (1) and (2):<\/P><\/p>\n<p><P><br clear='none'\/>\n(1) Give me (some) more coffee.<BR><\/p>\n<p>(2) Five customers bought a laptop yesterday, and one more customer bought a<br clear='none'\/>\ndesktop this morning.<\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>In its incremental reading, the request in (1) is satisfied even if the quantity<br clear='none'\/>\nof coffee that I receive is less than the quantity of coffee that I got<br clear='none'\/>\nbefore. In the same way, (2) is true even in case only one customer bought a<br clear='none'\/>\ncomputer this morning. Incremental readings are not attested with all<br clear='none'\/>\npredicates under all conditions, cf. (3) and (4):<\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>(3) Bob was happy right after the talk, and he is going to be happier tonight at<br clear='none'\/>\nthe party.<BR><\/p>\n<p>(4) The temperature rose by 4C yesterday afternoon, and it&apos;s going to rise some<br clear='none'\/>\nmore this afternoon.<\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>(3) entails that Bob will be happier at the party than he was right after the<br clear='none'\/>\ntalk &#8212; hence, no incremental reading is available. (4) has an incremental<br clear='none'\/>\nreading according to which the temperature might rise by less than 4C this<br clear='none'\/>\nafternoon. And it might even be the case that the temperature fell down during<br clear='none'\/>\nthe night, and rose back again before now. However, it has to be the case that<br clear='none'\/>\nthe temperature rises from the degree it had reached yesterday afternoon &#8212; not<br clear='none'\/>\nfrom a lower degree. A proper analysis of incremental comparison must capture<br clear='none'\/>\nthese restrictions on the availability of incremental readings.<\/P><\/p>\n<p><P>It will be argued that incremental comparison arises from the use of a specific<br clear='none'\/>\nincremental comparison operator. Lexical ambiguity is supported by the absence<br clear='none'\/>\nof incremental comparison in languages that do not lack standard comparison of<br clear='none'\/>\nsuperiority (eg. German). The incremental comparison operator combines with a<br clear='none'\/>\nproperty G of eventualities and degrees, and asserts that G is satisfied by an<br clear='none'\/>\neventuality E to some degree D. It also introduces a presupposition that a<br clear='none'\/>\nspecific eventuality E&apos; that is associated with a degree D&apos; precedes E, such<br clear='none'\/>\nthat G is satisfied by the sum of E and E&apos;, to the degree D plus D&apos;. In other<br clear='none'\/>\nwords, the incremental comparison operator asserts that G(E)(D) is true and<br clear='none'\/>\npresupposes that D increments a previous degree D&apos; associated with a previous<br clear='none'\/>\neventuality E&apos;. It is argued that the reference to a sum of eventualities E+E&apos;<br clear='none'\/>\nin the presupposition suffices to rule out unattested\/limited incremental<br clear='none'\/>\nreadings with examples such as (3) and (4).<\/P><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Guillaume Thomas Title: Incremental comparatives Time: Thurs 4\/16, 12:30-1:45 Place: 32-D461 In this talk I will investigate a form of comparison of superiority that one could call `incremental&apos;, as in (1) and (2): (1) Give me (some) more coffee. (2) Five customers bought a laptop yesterday, and one more customer bought a desktop this [&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-694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694","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=694"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":708,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694\/revisions\/708"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}