Classes Cancelled on Monday
Due to snow storm, the University, including the FAS, has suspended all but core operations today, February 9. This is the second time Harvard has suspended operations due to inclement weather in two weeks. According to an article in the Harvard Crimson, "Harvard, however, has rarely closed for inclement weather events in the past. In 1977, former Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III joked that, “Harvard University will close only for an act of God, such as the end of the world.”
Happy snow day!
Photo by Isabelle Charnavel
Polinsky Lab Meeting
Paper Presentation (Presentation by Dora Milhoc)
Bhatt, Rajesh, and Roumyana Pancheva. "Conditionals." The Blackwell companion to syntax (2006): 638-687.
Wednesday, February 11 | 5:15pm | 2 Arrow Street (4th floor conference room)
Harvard at BLS41
The following talks featured Harvard presenters at the 41st Annual Meeting of Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS) that took place on Saturday, February 7.
- Lena Borise: Tagalog sluicing reanalyzed
- Zuzanna Fuchs: Toward a focus analysis of Almost Wackernagel clitics in Wakhi
- Tyler Lau: Reevaluating the diphthong mergers in Japono-Ryukyuan
- Jenny Lee: Pluractionality and the stative vs. eventive contrast in Ranmo
Job Talk: Wataru Uegaki
Wataru Uegaki
Interpreting questions under attitudes
Friday, February 13 | 4pm-6pm | Boylston 103
Reception in the Department of Linguistics immediately following the talk.
Since Karttunen (1977), interpretations of embedded questions have played a central role in the development of the semantics of questions. One of the important observations in this domain is that interpretations of embedded questions vary depending on the type of embedding attitude predicates. More specifically, cognitive attitude predicates like "know" prefer strongly-exhaustive interpretations of their interrogative complements (Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984) while emotive factives like “surprise” and “be happy" only allow weakly-exhaustive interpretations (Heim 1994, a.o). Also, Égré & Spector (2007, to appear) argue that the class of predicates that are veridical with respect to interrogative-embedding are precisely the class of predicate that are factive with respect to declarative-embedding. Despite the rich literature on embedded questions, however, there has been no account that succeeds in predicting both their exhaustivity and veridicality given the lexical semantics of embedding predicates. In this talk, I propose a theory of question-embedding that is properly constrained to achieve this prediction. My analysis of exhaustivity is based on a reformulation of Klinedinst and Rothschild's (2011) analysis of the so-called intermediate exhaustivity. Under this analysis, matrix exhaustification derives intermediate exhaustivity, but the exhaustification is vacuous when the embedding predicate is non-monotonic. Strong exhaustivity is argued to be pragmatically derived from intermediate exhaustivity. Thus, exhaustivity of embedded questions depends on the monotonicity property of embedding predicates, which I argue to be the relevant property distinguishing between cognitive attitude predicates and emotive factives. Building on Uegaki (to appear), I further analyze declarative-embedding as a special, trivial, case of question-embedding. Under this analysis, factivity is derived as a limiting case of veridicality, providing a natural explanation for Égré & Spector's generalization (cf. Theiler 2014). The analysis will then be extended to mention-some readings, including George's (2011) "non-reducibility” puzzle. I will conclude by discussing several open questions concerning the syntax and semantics of attitude predicates and interrogatives in general.