{"id":7989,"date":"2016-02-08T05:00:37","date_gmt":"2016-02-08T09:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=7989"},"modified":"2016-02-07T18:46:15","modified_gmt":"2016-02-07T22:46:15","slug":"lfrg-210-despina-oikonomou","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2016\/02\/08\/lfrg-210-despina-oikonomou\/","title":{"rendered":"LFRG 2\/10 - Despina Oikonomou"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: <strong>Despina Oikonomou<\/strong><\/br><br clear='none'\/>\nTime: Wednesday, February 10, 1-2pm<\/br><br clear='none'\/>\nPlace: 32-D831<\/br><br clear='none'\/>\nTitle: Imperatives are existential modals; Deriving the must-reading as an Implicature<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>The diverse interpretation of Imperatives has been a long-lasting puzzle in the literature (Wilson & Sperber 1988, Han 2000, Schwager 2006 \/ Kaufmann 2012, Portner 2007, Condoravdi & Lauer 2012, von Fintel & Iatridou 2015). For example, the sentence in (1) is interpreted as permission in a context where the Addressee wants to open the window and as command\/request in an out-of-the-blue context where a Professor asks a student to open the window:<\/p>\n<p>(1)      Open the window.<\/p>\n<p>In this talk I argue that Imperatives involve an existential modal, drawing evidence from scopal ambiguities in the presence of other quantificational elements such as only and few (cf. Haida & Repp 2011). I show that the need for a covert existential operator in Imperatives is evident in languages like Greek where overt movement resolves scopal ambiguities. The universal reading is explained on the basis of two factors; i) lack of a stronger scalar counterpart as opposed to overt modals (cf. Deal 2011) ii) strengthening via an implicature derived in the presence of certain Focus Alternatives (cf. Schwager 2005). If time permits, I will discuss some other covert modals (unembedded subjunctives in Greek and dispositional middles) which also seem to be ambiguous between an existential and a universal reading and suggest that the present analysis can be extended in these environments as well.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Despina Oikonomou Time: Wednesday, February 10, 1-2pm Place: 32-D831 Title: Imperatives are existential modals; Deriving the must-reading as an Implicature The diverse interpretation of Imperatives has been a long-lasting puzzle in the literature (Wilson &#038; Sperber 1988, Han 2000, Schwager 2006 \/ Kaufmann 2012, Portner 2007, Condoravdi &#038; Lauer 2012, von Fintel &#038; Iatridou [&hellip;]<\/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-7989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7989","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=7989"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7989\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7990,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7989\/revisions\/7990"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7989"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7989"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7989"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}