The first syntax-semantics reading group meeting will take place Friday, September 24th at 2:30pm. Alex Göbel will be presenting his work, “Accommodation, Global and Local: Experimental Data from English & Vietnamese“. We will also set up the schedule for the semester.
Abstract:
The ability of (some) presuppositions to be accommodated – either relative to the global context when they are not satisfied or locally when embedded under a semantic operator in order to prevent a clash – constitutes an important aspect of semantic theorizing but is empirically not well understood. In this collaborative project with Thuy Bui (Nguyen Tat Thanh University, Vietnam), we were interested in assessing whether global and local accommodation difficulty pattern together across a range of presupposition trigger types – following up on an impressionistic overlap of prior classifications – and if as a result the two accommodation types should be viewed as being rooted in the same underlying mechanism or not. I will present data from three experiments comparing English and Vietnamese to address this issue, additionally contributing an extension to an understudied language and a cross-linguistic perspective.
Please remember to register in advance at the following link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZArduGorzMsH9YD9vzVXNnLxjWRfiB6ZLqk. You can also sign up for slots here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1WHtIRQVvHXipoVKlh-0xhHYKuCh55b5CwPqA4n3ueBM/edit#gid=0. Finally, if you did not receive an email from Jonny last Friday (through the group mailing list) and wish to be added to the list, please email him. (jonathan.palucci@mail.mcgill.ca)