[lingtalks] UCLA Colloquium this Friday - Martin Hackl

[Karma Dolma]

Friday, January 26

11:00-12:50
Public Policy 2270
Colloquium


  _____  

From: Harrington, Lisa [mailto:harrington at humnet.ucla.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2007 8:36 AM
To: Linguistics Colloquium List (BOL)
Cc: dolma at usc.edu
Subject: FW: [LINGdept] Colloquium this Friday - Martin Hackl


 

Hi All,
This weeks colloquium speaker is Martin Hackl from Pomona College. Here is
the abstract for this talk. 



On Proportional Quantifiers

 

Martin Hackl - Pomona College

 

In his talk, I will investigate proportional quantifiers such as most, more
than half, etc. in English and German and defend the following claim: 

 

The meanings of proportional quantifiers are not semantic primitives of
quantification in natural language - contra Generalized Quantifier Theory
(GQT). Instead, proportional quantifiers employ semantic primitives familiar
from the study of comparative constructions (degree expressions, comparative
- and superlative operators, degree functions, measure functions, etc.). 

 

Support for this claim comes chiefly from a detailed argument combining
language internal ("theoretical") evidence and language external
(processing) evidence that most needs to be analyzed as a superlative
expression while its truth-conditionally equivalent counterpart more than
half is a comparative construction. 

 

The language internal argument is based on the observations that most and
its German counterpart die meisten not only bear morpho-syntactic
resemblance to the superlative of many/viel (a tendency that seems to hold
across languages), they are also subject that the same constraints that
govern the possible interpretations of superlatives in general - with two
important qualifications: 1. most/die meisten does not have a genuine
absolute interpretation. In its stead it has a proportional determiner
interpretation equivalent to more than half. 2. The polar counterpart
fewest/die wenigsten cannot be understood to convey a proportional
quantifier meaning along the lines of less than half. It has only a relative
superlative interpretation. The second point exemplifies a systematic
"lexical" gap in the inventory of quantificational expressions that holds
across languages. Obviously, this gap cannot be explained by appealing to a
GQT universal, since the intended meaning is perfectly legitimately
expressed my less than half. Instead it calls for a compositional analysis
of most and fewest that explains how most gives rise to a proportional
meaning in contexts that allow only absolute readings of superlatives but
fewest cannot. I will show that such an analysis can be obtained once most
and fewest are decomposed into a superlative -est and many/few.

 

The analysis of proportional most as superlative of many leads to the second
argument in that it predicts different LFs for truth-conditionally
equivalent statements of the for most A B and more than half of the A B.
Given that and assuming that LFs (or structured propositions) inform
verification procedures, it is possible to derive different verification
strategies for the two types of statements. I will argue, more specifically,
that most AB triggers a form of vote-counting, which does not involve
counting the total number of As, while more than half of the AB triggers
counting strategy similar to the one triggered by basic comparative
quantifiers such as more than n AB.  Empirical support for this difference
in verification strategies will come from verification studies using a novel
experimental technique called "Self-Paced Counting."

 

  

  _____  

Food
<http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index;_ylc=X3oDMTFvbGNhMGE3BF9TAzM5NjU0NTEwOAR
fcwMzOTY1NDUxMDMEc2VjA21haWxfdGFnbGluZQRzbGsDbWFpbF90YWcx?link=ask&sid=39654
5367> fight? Enjoy some healthy debate
in the Yahoo!
<http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/index;_ylc=X3oDMTFvbGNhMGE3BF9TAzM5NjU0NTEwOAR
fcwMzOTY1NDUxMDMEc2VjA21haWxfdGFnbGluZQRzbGsDbWFpbF90YWcx?link=ask&sid=39654
5367> Answers Food & Drink Q&A.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://ling.ucsd.edu/pipermail/lingtalks/attachments/20070125/78747cb6/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: ATT10540538.txt
Url: https://ling.ucsd.edu/pipermail/lingtalks/attachments/20070125/78747cb6/attachment.txt