קולוקוויום מחקרי - החוג לבלשנות

במסגרת הקולוקוויום המחקרי של החוג לבלשנות, שמתקיים מדי יום חמישי, בין השעות 16:15-17:45 בבניין ווב (חדר 103):

הרצאתו של פרופ' דני פוקס מ-MIT, שכותרתה:

Gender in Nominal Structures, Assertion, Presupposition Weakening and the Strength of Presuppositions

תקציר:

In this talk we will look at the semantic contribution of gender features to study a surprising prediction of a new proposal for Local Accommodation that we’ve been developing. Our proposal, which treats LA as a particular form of Presupposition Weakening (PW), accounts, among other things, for two distinctions among presupposition triggers and for correlations between them. It has been suggested that presupposition triggers that can be deleted (in Katzir’s sense) yield presuppositions that are more difficult to cancel (to be locally accommodated) than presupposition that cannot be deleted – that deletable triggers are uniformly strong triggers. It has also been suggested (a) that non-deletable/weak triggers yield structures where the assertion entails the presupposition – entailing triggers, and (b) that deletable/strong triggers yield assertions and presuppositions that are logically independent – non-entailing triggers.
We suggest that these correlations follow from our approach to PW, together with a Katzir-inspired procedure that retrieves the assertion from the syntax of a sentence and its trivalent meaning. We will present some of the arguments for all of this, but will focus on the new prediction for gender. Based on observations made in Bobaljik and Zoca (2010), our proposal will make the new prediction that the presupposition triggered by gender a feature will sometimes behave like a weak/entailing trigger and sometimes like a strong /non-entailing triggers. We predict, more specifically, that the deletability of the trigger is a necessary, but insufficient, condition for a non-entailing assertion. Whether an assertion is non-entailing depends not just on the deletability of the trigger but also on the specific outcome of deletion
(which we claim yield the assertion), and in particular on its logical relation to the presupposition.

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