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Organizers:
Nicole Gotzner (SIGames, ZAS Berlin), Uli Sauerland (SSI, ZAS Berlin) and Maribel Romero (BiasQ, Universität Konstanz)
Time and Venue:
2 – 3 June 2016, Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS Berlin),
Talks in Trajekte-Raum (room 308, 3rd floor), Poster session in Room 403, 4th floor
How to get to ZAS!
Invited speakers:
Maria Aloni (University of Amsterdam), Stephen Crain (Macquarie University)
Contact:
Nicole Gotzner (nicole.gotzner@googlemail.com)
Aim of the workshop:
The favorite English word of all pragmaticists should be the disjunction “or”: So much pragmatic research is dedicated to conditions of use of the simple disjunction. Disjunction is so interesting pragmatically because its logical meaning is very prominent, but at the same time it cannot be used in most context without indicating some ignorance. “My husband has blue or brown eyes” would be an odd thing to say, because it suggests that the speaker is ignorant about her (or his) husband’s eye color. So the difference between the literal sentence meaning and the speaker’s meaning is very clear.
The emergence of experimental pragmatics incorporating precise semantic models and formal experiments has lead to much progress on the understanding of disjunction. This workshop provides a forum for the comparison of current, competing semantic and pragmatic theories of disjunction. Recent important theoretical contributions include the idea to build the alternatives into the semantics of “or” (Alonso-Ovalle 2006, 2008), accounts of free-choice “or” (Fox 2007) as well as various accounts of Hurford’s constraint (Singh 2008, Meyer 2013, 2015, Singh & Katzir 2013, Chierchia, et al. 2012, Fox & Spector submitted).
In addition, there are many strands of experiment based research that have contributed to our understanding of disjunction and that we hope to see represented at this workshop. Experimental work has probed the behaviour disjunction under embedding, in upward and downward entailing contexts (Schwarz et al. 2008, Chemla & Spector 2011), its interaction with focus (Chevalier et al. 2008) and cross-linguistic diversity (Davidson 2014). The greatest contribution to our understanding of disjunction has possibly been made by language acquisition research (Chierchia et al. 2001, Crain 2008, Su et al. 2013, Tieu et al. 2015, Singh et al. submitted).
Thursday, June 2nd 2016
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| 9:00 – 9:10 | WELCOME |
| 9:10 – 10:10 | “Only The Dark Knight is free to choose” (slides) Invited talk by Stephen Crain (Macquarie University) |
10:10 – 10:50 | “Conjunctive Disjunctions: Evidence for the Ambiguity Theory” (abstract) Uli Sauerland & Kazuko Yatsushiro (ZAS Berlin) |
| 10:50 – 11:10 | COFFEE BREAK |
| 11:10 – 11:50 | “Anti-Free Choice disjunctions and obligatory ignorance” (slides) Natalia Ivlieva |
| 11:50 – 12:30 | “Negated disjunctive statements: the Italian perspective” (slides) Elena Pagliarini, Stephen Crain and Maria Teresa Guasti |
| 12:30 – 14:00 | LUNCH BREAK |
| 14:00 – 16:00 | Poster session with coffee in Room 403! |
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| 16:00 – 16:40 | “Symmetry, Pruning, and Brevity” (slides) Marie-Christine Meyer |
| 16:40 – 17:20 | “A unified account of the distributive and free choice inferences of disjunction under modals” (slides) Paolo Santorio and Jacopo Romoli |
| 18:30 | Dinner at Tapas y mas Neue Grünstraße 17. 10179 Berlin-Mitte |
Friday, June 3rd 2016
| Time | Event |
|---|---|
| 9:10 – 10:10 | “Disjunctions in state-based semantics” (slides) Invited talk by Maria Aloni |
| 10:10 – 10:50 | “Strong Exhaustivity, Alternative Questions and Monotonicity: Some thoughts on Cremers & Chemla (2016)” (slides) Maribel Romero |
| 10:50 – 11:10 | COFFEE BREAK |
| 11:10 – 11:50 | “How basic is the notion of alternative? A diachronic typology of disjunction” (slides) Caterina Mauri |
| 11:50 – 12:30 | “Turkish disjunctions and the morphological realization of exh” (abstract) Can Mekik and Raj Singh |
| 12:30 – 14:00 | LUNCH BREAK |
| 14:00 – 14:40 | “Embedded disjunctions and the Best Response Paradigm” (slides) Anton Benz & Nicole Gotzner |
| 14:40 – 15:20 | “Exclusive disjunction: implicature or …” (slides) Michael Franke & Bob van Tiel |
| 15:20 – 15:40 | COFFEE BREAK |
| 15:40 – 16:20 | “The interpretation of disjunction involving negative linguistic contexts in Mandarin Chinese” (slides) Na Gao, Stephen Crain, Peng Zhou and Rosalind Thornton |
| 16:20 – 17:00 | “Disjunction under if” (handout) Elena Herburger |
| 17:00 – 17:10 | CLOSING REMARKS |
Program Committee
Nicole Gotzner
Uli Sauerland
Maribel Romero
Maria Aloni
Stephen Crain
Jack Tomlinson
Kazuko Yatsushiro
Clemens Mayr
Marie-Christine Meyer
Andreea Nicolae
Anton Benz
Bob van Tiel
Yaron McNabb
Lyn Tieu
Jacopo Romoli