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

Abstract:
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’t

In 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.