Vorträge Wintersemester 2023/24
25.10. Vesela Simeonova (Graz): Modals for the present and for the past in Bulgarian [online]
The interactions of tense and epistemic modals have been subject to a great deal of interest since Condoravdi's (2002) seminal work. Condoravdi argues that past tense can project either higher or lower than the modal, giving rise to epistemic and counterfactual (CF) readings, respectively (and not in both positions). This is illustrated in (1).
(1) Mary might have won the race.
a. epistemic reading: modal > past
b. CF reading: past > modal
c. impossible: past > modal > past
Condoravdi explores this topic predominantly with English data and, as shown in (1), the proposed solution is syntactically covert. Bulgarian is an ideally suited language to test this theory empirically and determine the position at which tense is interpreted relative to the modal, because: (i) it has overtly tensed modals; (ii) it has no infinitives.
In this talk, I show that some of Condoravdi's predictions are borne out for Bulgarian, while others lead to an additional layer of complexity, and explore the empirical and theoretical consequences of these findings in relation to more recent cross-linguistic developments on epistemic modality.
Condoravdi, Cleo (2002). Temporal interpretation of modals: modals for the present and for the past. In: Beaver, Martinez, Clark, Kaufmann (Eds.), The Construction of Meaning, pp 59-88. CSLI Publications.
1.11. Olga Borik (UNED, Madrid): Commitment datives (joint work with Ismael Iván Teomiro García) [hybrid]
In this talk, we focus on a specific use of the dative case – commitment dative – and put forward the hypothesis that these datives can be used to overtly express commitment of the speaker or the hearer. We argue that this type of datives cannot be easily explained by applicative-based analyses (see Cuervo 2020 for an overview) without radically changing the semantics of the applicative because they are restricted to particular types of speech acts, namely, commissives and directives. Instead, we rely on the proposal of Geurts (2019), who offers a commitment-based analysis for basic speech acts, including commissives and directives. Drawing on empirical data from Russian and Spanish, we argue that the main contribution of commitment datives is to overtly mark the commitment of the speaker to the goal of making the proposition expressed by the sentence true (Geurts 2019).
15.11. Jan Chromý (Prag): What do we recall immediately after reading a sentence? [hybrid]
Der Vortrag basiert auf dem folgenden Artikel:
Chromý, J. & Vojvodić, S. (2023). When and where did it happen? Systematic differences in recall of core and optional sentence information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, DOI: 10.1177/1747021823115919 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17470218231159190)
22.11. Metodi Efremov (Nova Gorica/Leipzig): The Semantics of the Macedonian Definite Articles [hybrid]
Dog+the refl.CL playing
‘The only dog in the current situation is playing.’
-
Kucheno si igra.
Dog+the.distal refl.CL playing
‘The dog distant from us in the current situation is playing.’ -
Kuchevo si igra.
Dog+the.proximal refl.CL playing
‘The dog close to me in the current situation is playing.'
While this paradigm has been documented in the literature, the full extent of how similar and how different the three definite articles are semantically has not been accomplished. In this talk, we attempt to fill this gap. In doing so, we follow Schwarz's (2009, 2013) general theoretical proposal that uniqueness and familiarity are necessary to explain the semantic behavior of definite articles. On the basis of various data that we will present, we argue that the t-root article in Macedonian lexicalizes iota and satisfies strong and weak familiarity, while the v and n-root articles satisfy weak familiarity. We will additionally present data that illustrates that the three articles are not equivalent to their corresponding demonstratives, from which they historically evolved, as the latter have different presuppositions for their use to be felicitous (Minova-Gjurkova, 1994; Karapejovski, 2017, 2020).
20.12. Karolina Zuchewicz (Leipzig): Aspect and pragmatics in Polish [hybrid]
In this talk, I contribute to the discussion on the meaning of the Polish perfective by analyzing the so-called general-factual contexts, i.e., contexts that refer to completed events. In Slavic, both perfective and imperfective aspect can be used in order to refer to such events, but the exact distribution of the two aspectual alternatives is language-specific (Dickey 2000, Grønn 2004, Altshuler 2014, Mueller-Reichau 2018, Klimek-Jankowska 2020, 2022, Gehrke 2022, 2023 among many others). Whereas in East Slavic languages, imperfective aspect is strongly preferred in general-factual contexts, in West Slavic languages, there is a competition between imperfective and perfective forms. This talk discusses the role of pragmatics in aspect choice in general-factual contexts in Polish. It shows that the presence or absence of pragmatic contract between the interlocutors (cf. Israeli 1996 for Russian) systematically disambiguates between the preference for the perfective (former case) and the imperfective (latter case). I view the presence of pragmatic contract as an instance of uniqueness and argue for the strong pragmatic force of the Polish perfective.
10.1. Mariia Razguliaeva, Maria Onoeva, Radek Šimík & Roland Meyer (HU Berlin & Prague): Polar question meaning in Slavic: Visual world eye-tracking evidence [hybrid]
Polar questions (PQs) have traditionally been analyzed as denoting the set of their two possible answers (Hamblin 1973) or the corresponding bipartition of possible worlds (Groenendijk & Stokhof 1984). Setting important technical details aside, a PQ like "Is it raining?" would denote the set {it is raining, it is not raining}, or {p, ~p} with p=[[it is raining]]. This simplistic view has recently been challenged from various angles. First, there is growing evidence that the baseline semantics is crucially complemented by PQ bias - a preference for one of the two answers, based either in the speaker's beliefs or in the contextual evidence (Büring & Gunlogson 2000; Romero & Han 2004; Sudo 2013; Goodhue 2022; a.o.). Second, some authors have questioned the very idea that PQs denote a set of two propositions. Biezma & Rawlins (2012) argue that a polar question denotes a singleton set {p} with the relevance of the other alternative being merely implicated.
We aim to shed light on the meaning of PQs by investigating their online processing using an eye-tracking visual world experiment. Building on Tian et al.'s (2016, 2021) work on English and French, we look at the processing of Russian and Czech PQs and assertions. We ran a number of closely parallel visual world eye-tracking experiments in the two language mutations. All stimuli were short prerecorded dialogues starting with the target utterance containing a transitive verb, its subject and object, and an adverbial, followed by a brief response of the form `I think that yes/no'. In the target utternace, we manipulated several variables: 1) force (question vs. statement); 2) polarity (affirmative vs. negative); 3) verb position (sentece-initial or medial); 4) presence or absence of a particle (razve in Russian, snad and asi in Czech). Simultaneously with the auditory linguistic stimulus, participants were presented with four pictures on a screen, two corresponding to the two alternatives p and ~p, and two showing unrelated distractors. We measured the durations of fixations to p and ~p images during different parts of the utterance. Our results corroborate Tian et al.'s findings with new evidence from Slavic languages, and provide support for Biezma & Rawlins' (2012) singleton-based analysis of PQs, as well as preliminary evidence for the presence of positive epistemic bias in negative PQs.
17.1. Mojmír Dočekal, Michaela Hulmanová & Aviv Schoenfeld (Brno & Tel Aviv): Slavic episodic and generic sorting: Experimental evidence from Slovak [zoom]
In this talk, we report on an experimental study of the sorting in Slovak episodic and generic sentences. The experiment shows that Slovak sorting is very much constrained, unlike the previously reported universal sorter in English (see Bunt, 1985 a.o.: *fuels* meaning 'kinds of fuel', e.g.).
Based on the suggestions from the previous literature, we tested both verbal and nominal factors that might influence the availability of sorting. The results show that the sorting is influenced by the type of the predicate (episodic vs. generic) but also by the count/mass/object-mass denotation of the noun.
The inferential statistics of the experiment suggest which factors are more important than others. Finally, we discuss some possible reasons for the observed differences between Slovak and English sorting.
24.1. Sławomir Zdziebko (Lublin): There is no escape from abstract representations. Containment, faithfulness and Polish palatalizations [zoom]
The presentation offers a comprehensive overview of the palatalization processes attested in Polish. It also argues for the following set of theoretically relevant points:
- the underapplication of Surface Velar Palatalization in the context of de-nasalized nasal vowels is best accounted for under the containment version of OT
- most palatalization changes must take morphological and lexical context into account. They are not purely phonological and are best analysed in terms of the anchoring of floating Place of Articulation nodes onto the stem-final consonants
- a uniform account of morphophonologically-driven palatalizations calls for the reference to traditional faithfulness constraints (Max, Ident). This suggests that the containment version of OT must assume faithfulness constraints
- the comprehensive account of Polish palatalizations does not call for constraint re-ranking at any point of the derivation. It may be provided within the parallel version of OT.
7.2. Joanna Zaleska (HU Berlin): Interacting processes in Slovak (morpho)phonology: Data, generalisations and some analysis [in Präsenz]