Anne Bertrand (UBC) will be presenting a talk “A vector-space semantics for scalar expressions in Ktunaxa.” The meeting will take place on Monday, November 25 at 3pm in Room 002 of the McGill linguistics department. Anne’s abstract is below:
Ktunaxa, a language isolate spoken in the Columbia River basin in Canada and the United States, exhibits robust evidence for the availability of degrees in its semantics ontology (Bertrand, 2022). At the same time, Ktunaxa expressions used to convey scalar meanings often convey spatial and motion meanings. This connection is unaccounted for under a degree analysis of scalarity in Ktunaxa. Building on the vector space semantics model elaborated to account for spatial meanings encoded in prepositions (Zwarts, 1997; Zwarts and Winter, 2000) and on its extension to scalar meanings (Faller, 1999; Winter, 2005), I propose a vector-based analysis of Ktunaxa scalar predicates and of the comparative modifier qayaqanaⱡ. I show that this analysis captures the connection between scalarity and spatial meanings straightforwardly. I reconsider the patterns that have been taken as unequivocal evidence for degrees in Ktunaxa and crosslinguistically (cf. Beck et al. 2009 i.a.). I argue that these patterns can be accounted for with vectors without losing explanatory adequacy. Time permitting, I hope to discuss the implications of this analysis for a crosslinguistic typology of scalar meanings and for field methods used in the documentation of scalar expressions in underdescribed languages.
Online participants can join with this link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYvfu6orzIrHtEHSdthyymSx50ZHxlHqvwu.