{"id":7644,"date":"2015-10-05T05:07:52","date_gmt":"2015-10-05T09:07:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=7644"},"modified":"2015-10-05T12:57:18","modified_gmt":"2015-10-05T16:57:18","slug":"106-patrick-grosz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2015\/10\/05\/106-patrick-grosz\/","title":{"rendered":"Special LFRG 10\/6 - Patrick Grosz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaker: Patrick Grosz<\/a><\/strong> (Tuebingen)<\/br>
\nTime: Tuesday, Oct. 6, 1-2:30pm<\/br>
\nLocation: 32-D831<\/br>
\nTitle: On the syntax and semantics of God knows what \u0096 a scalar epistemic indefinite<\/p>\n

\n

This talk investigates phrases such as ‘wei\u00df Gott w-’ (‘God knows wh-‘) in German, in (1). Similar constructions are attested in a wide range of European languages (Haspelmath 1997:131).<\/p>\n

(1) Der muss gedacht haben, wir seien wei\u00df Gott wer. [DeReKo corpus, U03\/AUG.02157]<\/br>
\n intended: ‘He must have thought that we are someone important.’<\/br>
\n literal: ‘He must have thought that we are God knows who.’<\/p>\n

While ‘wei\u00df Gott w-’ phrases originate as separate clauses (CPs) that are parenthetically inserted into a host clause (so-called “Andrews amalgams”, Lakoff 1974), I argue that ‘wei\u00df Gott’ (‘God knows’) in Present Day German (PDG) has fully grammaticalized into an indefinite particle (like German ‘irgend’ [‘any, some’]); it combines with a wh-element to form a complex word of category D (an indefinite determiner\/pronoun). I argue that ‘wei\u00df Gott w-’ indefinites are scalar in that they [i.] existentially quantify over a subset X of the alternatives that the wh-element introduces, [ii.] and the alternatives in this subset X are high on a salient scale. This scalar effect is illustrated in (1), where ‘wei\u00df Gott wer’ (‘God knows who’) is understood to mean ‘someone important’ (i.e. someone who is high on a scale of importance). I argue that the scalarity of ‘wei\u00df Gott w-’ is part of the truth-functional at-issue content of a sentence (cf. Potts 2015), due to semantic reanalysis of what used to be a conversational implicature (cf. Eckardt 2006).<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaker: Patrick Grosz (Tuebingen) Time: Tuesday, Oct. 6, 1-2:30pm Location: 32-D831 Title: On the syntax and semantics of God knows what \u0096 a scalar epistemic indefinite This talk investigates phrases such as ‘wei\u00df Gott w-’ (‘God knows wh-‘) in German, in (1). Similar constructions are attested in a wide range of European languages (Haspelmath 1997:131). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7644","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\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7644"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7648,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7644\/revisions\/7648"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}