Supplementing the usual Monday Syn-Sem programming, Mathieu Paillé (University of Calgary) is giving a practice talk on Wednesday, January 22, at 9:00 – 10:00 am in Room 117 of the McGill linguistics building. For those who wish to join remotely, the Zoom link is included at the bottom of this message.
Here is the abstract for Mathieu’s talk “A unified approach to three kinds of strength in predication”:
This talk examines three classes of predicates whose intuited meanings can be described, in their own way, as strong. Predicates of individuals quantifying over parts (e.g. green) are strong in the sense of quantifying universally; non-quantifying predicates of individuals (e.g. table) are strong in the sense of being conceptually exclusive of other predicates from the same conceptual domain; and thematic predicates of events (e.g. for Lisa) are strong in the sense of having a uniqueness entailment (so-called ‘thematic uniqueness’). I show that these classes of predicates all interact identically with and and also; on the basis of this observation, I suggest that these predicates are all strong due to the same predicate-exhaustification effect. I then show that modelling the three classes’ meaning as involving the same semantic mechanism helps us make some correct predictions about other ways the predicates are similar. In particular, predicates like green have been claimed to involve truth-value gaps and non-maximality; I show that these phenomena can also be observed in predicates like table and for Lisa, once they are viewed from the right perspective.
Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/_qcl3xAFTa-stagvpck_KQ.