Full Title: Gaps and imprecision in natural language semantics: homogeneity effects and beyond
Short Title: HNM2

Date: 19-Jul-2023 - 20-Jul-2023
Location: University of Vienna, Austria
Contact Person: Keny Chatain
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://hnm2-workshop.netlify.app/

Linguistic Field(s): Linguistic Theories; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics

Call Deadline: 15-May-2023

Meeting Description:

Homogeneity is a truth-value gap phenomenon that appears to differ from standard presuppositions both in its pragmatics and in its projection behavior. The paradigmatic examples involve definite plurals (Fodor 1970 a.o.): Neither of the sentences in (1-a) seems true if John read, say, half of the books.

Several other classes of expressions have recently been argued to exhibit homogeneity-like gaps, including generics (1-b) (see e.g. von Fintel 1997, Löbner 2000 a.o), absolute adjectives (1-c) (see e.g. Feinmann 2022, Haslinger & Paillé to appear) and weak necessity modals (1-d) (see e.g. Agha & Jeretič 2022). If these studies are on the right track, homogeneity is widespread throughout the lexicon. Nevertheless, there is no consensus on the constraints on homogeneity and the semantic/pragmatic mechanisms underlying it.

(1)

a. John read the books. / John didn’t read the books.
b. Tigers have stripes. / Tigers don’t have stripes.
c. The door is open. / The door isn’t open.
d. You should go. / You shouldn’t go.

Homogeneity effects often go hand in hand with imprecision, a form of context-dependency by virtue of which sentences may receive truth conditions that are weaker than their strong default interpretation. For instance, in some contexts, (1-a) may be judged true if John read only some of the books (see e.g. Malamud 2012); generics may have near-existential interpretations (cf. Mosquitoes spread malaria; see e.g. Leslie 2008) and a door with a very narrow opening may still count as not open. Since the influential work of Križ (2015, 2016), imprecision has been modeled in terms of a contextually provided QUD parameter; a sentence with a homogeneity gap can count as “true enough” (cf. Lasersohn 1999) in a situation falling into the gap if the QUD does not distinguish this situation from situations making the sentence true. While this general picture is widely accepted for plural predication, there is relatively little work on the complications of extending it to other imprecision phenomena.

Call for Papers:

See detailed call at https://hnm2-workshop.netlify.app/call/

Abstract requirements

- There will be two talk categories: full talks (40 minutes) and squibs (20 minutes). If you want your abstract to only be considered for one of the two formats, please add “squib” or “full talk” to the list of keywords.
- The main text of the abstract should be at most 3 pages (Times New Roman, 12pt, 2.5cm margin).
- References, figures and glossed examples may be added on additional pages exceeding the 3-page limit.
- Abstracts should be anonymized and submitted in PDF format.
- Deadline: May 15th, 12:00 (noon) EST/18:00 CET
- Any questions may be sent to [email protected]
- Submit to Easy Chair

Topics:

1. Homogeneity beyond plural predication
2. Imprecision beyond plural predication
3. Semantic properties of homogeneous predication
4. Connections between homogeneity and other forms of truth-value gaps
5. Homogeneity projection in embedded contexts
6. Connections between homogeneity and imprecision
7. Homogeneous/imprecise expressions cross-linguistically
8. Psycholinguistic methods and acquisition