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Linguistics
Department
Stanford
University |
Stanford
Humanities Center
Mellon
Foundation
Graduate
Research Workshop Program
Stanford
Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop:
THE
CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING
Friday, April 11, 3:30pm in 460-126:
Scalar Phenomena and Polarity: at the Interface of Grammar and
Pragmatics
Gennaro Chierchia (Milan)
Download the paper (.pdf).
Over the recent past, there has been substantive progress in our
understanding of the semantics of Negative Polarity Items (NPIs);
i.e. rather convincing hypotheses have been put forth that make us readily
see why they have the peculiar distribution they have (e.g. Kadmon and
Landman 1993, Krifka 1995, Lahiri 1998). There have also been, even more
recently, important breakthroughs in our understanding of Free Choice
Items (e.g. Dayal 1998, Kratzer and Shimoyama 2002). It is well known that
there is a robust link between NPIs and FCIs, as extensive typological
studies reveal that roughly one half of the languages use the very same
morphemes for the two type of items (while the other half resorts to
separate series - cf. e.g. Haspelmath 1996). The questions that we will
address against this background are the following:
i. How far along are we in getting an integrated view of FC vs. NP
phenomena?
ii. Many approaches appeal to implicatures in connection with polarity
items. What role do they play?
iii. How does pragmatics interact with "core" grammar?
Please contact one of the workshop organizers
if you have suggestions for presentations or the workshop in general.
Back to the workshop homepage.
This workshop is sponsored by
the Stanford Humanities Center, and funded by a grant from the Mellon
Foundation.
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