Speaker: Elizabeth Allyn Smith (UQAM)
Date & Time: Friday, December 4th at 3:30 pm
Place: ARTS Bldg. room 260
Title: Just say ‘no’: Cross-linguistic differences in the felicity of disagreements over issues of taste and possibility
Semanticists, pragmaticists, philosophers, and others have recently been interested in disagreements arising from evaluative propositions (especially those containing so-called “predicates of personal taste”), as in (1), and their theoretical implications, especially the mechanism behind the difference between (1) and (2).(1) A: This soup is tasty. B: No it isn’t.
(2) A: This soup is tasty, in my opinion. B: # No it isn’tIn this talk, I will present experimental data (in the form of offline felicity judgments) collected from English Catalan, French, and Spanish two-turn oral dialogues showing that there are differences with respect to (1) v. (2) and other similar judgments cross-linguistically that create a further puzzle. I will compare various explanations for these new data, drawing on ideas present in Stojanovic 2007, von Fintel & Gillies 2007, Bouchard 2012, Umbach 2012 and others. I will further discuss the interplay of various factors in these data, including comparison with another dialect of Spanish with known differences in cultural norms as compared to Iberian Spanish. Finally, I will propose an analysis in which different types of content affect the number and type of propositions attributed to a speaker’s discourse commitment set v. those being proposed for admission to the conversational common ground.