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Babbling
about: |
Suggested
readings: |
October |
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10/3 |
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10/10 |
- Everybody:
On Jeff Elman's recent CRL talk
On words and dinosaur bones: Where is meaning?
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10/17 |
- Jeff
and everybody else: More on Jeff Elman's
recent CRL talk: On words and dinosaur bones:
Where is meaning?
Jeff is joining us for the discussion
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10/24 |
[campus
closed because of fires] |
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10/31 |
- Kate:
Sentence-final "focus" doubling
in ASL: What's really going on?
In ASL, declarative sentences, yes/no sentences,
and even wh- questions often double an element
and place it in a sentence final position. For
example: WHAT YOUR NAME WHAT? In the ASL literature
this has been called a "focus" position,
with no attention paid to what semantic or pragmatic
type of focus, if any, it might have. It behaves
alluringly like a cleft... so come to SemBab
to hear more!
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November |
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11/7 |
- Laura:
Information Structural Effects on Ellipsis
Acceptability
I will present results from a
magnitude estimation study of verb phrase ellipsis
in which effects of syntactic structure have
been systematically dissociated from information
structure and semantics. I'd like to test out
my theoretical analysis of these results, but
we can also talk about the ins and outs of designing
experiments like these, if that's of interest.
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11/14 |
- Andy:
Be locally determined!
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11/21 |
THANKSGIVING |
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11/28 |
- Jonathan:
Colorful ontology
The
starting place for this babble is that I think
there are good psychophysical/metaphysical grounds
for holding that color properties are constituted
in terms of relations to subjects and viewing
conditions. Thus, they have something like the
form red for subject S in conditions C. On the
other hand, color predicates in natural languages
don't look like that at all; most importantly,
they lack overt parameters for subjects and
viewing conditions, and so fail to match up
against the relational color properties in form
and information. This situation leads to a number
of objections against the color relationalist's
ontology. The question I want to face is what
semantic and pragmatic resources are available
by which a relationalist might respond to these
objections.
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December |
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12/5 |
- Jonathan:
Colorful ontology: conclusions
- Ivano:
Let's go relative (embedded interrogatives and
declaratives that look like relatives in Adyghe)
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Alternate
topic |
- Everybody:
Let's focus on focus alternatives (or
implicatures?)
[send me references and material to post in
advance, if you find any]
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