Week of April 29, 2013

Language Universals Workshop

Yan Huang (University of Auckland)
Unarticulated Constituents (UCs) in Neo-Gricean Pragmatics
Tuesday, April 30 | 3:15-4:15pm | Sever Hall 110

In recent years, the concept of unarticulated constitutes (UCs) has generated heated debates in both the philosophy of language and linguistic semantics and pragmatics (see e.g. Recanati 2002, Stanley 2002, Marti 2006). By UCs is meant a propositional or conceptual constitute of a sentence that is not linguistically explicitly expressed in that sentence. Stock UC examples include (i) It’s raining [in where], (ii) John is ready [for what] and (iii) John went to a bookshop and [then] bought a novel. Three important issues are involved in the study of UCs: (i) do UCs exist, (ii) how the semantic content of UCs is pragmatically recovered, and (iii) what is the pragmatic enrichment involved in the recovery of UCs?

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, while examples like (iii) is traditionally analysed as containing a conversational implicature (see e.g. Grice 1989, Horn 2004, Levinson 2000), examples like (i) and (ii) have never received any formal treatment in neo-Gricean pragmatics. To fill this gap, I’ll provide a neo-Gricean account of the type of examples like (i) and (ii) in terms of Horn’s (2004) R- or Levinson’s (2000) I-principle, taking into account the Gricean distinction between generalised conversational implicature (GCI) and particularised conversational implicature (PCI). Secondly, following Huang (2007), I shall defend the neo-Gricean position that the pragmatic enrichment of UCs in these examples is nothing but a conversational implicature. The reasons are threefold. In the first place, the pragmatic enrichment that is required to recover the semantic content of UCs is engendered largely by the same Gricean pragmatic mechanism that yields a conversational implicature. Secondly, currently there is no reliable test either in theoretical pragmatics or in experimental pragmatics that can be used to distinguish alleged explicature, as in Relevance theory, the pragmatically enriched said, as argued by Recanati or impliciture, as argued by Bach, from conversational implicature. Thirdly, given the metatheoretical principle known as ‘Occam’s razor’, a unified, implicature analysis is methodological preferable, because it postulates fewer theoretical categories or representational levels than its competitors.

My conclusions are (i) there are genuine UCs, (ii) the semantic content of UCs is pragmatically recovered via the R/I-principle in neo-Gricean pragmatics, and (iii) the pragmatic enrichment involved is a pre-semantic conversational implicature.

Thesis Defense

Andreea Nicolae
Any Questions? Polarity as a Window into the Structure of Questions
Wednesday, May 1 | 9am-12pm | Boylston 303

Polinsky Lab Meeting

Sun-Hee Bae and Miwako Hisagi
Miwako and Sun-Hee will be presenting interim results for the Korean & Japanese experiments looking at nominative and topic markers and their omissions.
Wednesday, May 1 | 5:15-7pm | Polinsky Lab Room 420 (Conference Room)

2013 Undergraduate Thesis Colloquium

Thursday, May 2 | 12:30-4:30pm | Sever Hall 304

Spring Reception

The Department of Linguistics' annual Spring Reception will be held this Thursday. All undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and visitors---and their families---are invited to attend.

Thursday, May 2 | 5pm | Boylston Hall, 3rd Floor

GSAS Indo-European Workshop

Sam Zukoff (MIT)
The Origins of Attic Reduplication
Friday, May 3 | 4-5:30pm | Boylston 104

Harvard at NWLC 2013

Caitlin Keenan will be presenting her work "On the structure of Abkhaz -k' and its implications for the syntax of indefinite articles" at the 29th Northwest Linguistics Conference April 26-27.