Workshop “The pragmatics of quantifiers: implicature and presupposition – experiment and theory”

Organizers:
Uli Sauerland (LISI, ZAS Berlin), Stephanie Solt (DegAtt, ZAS Berlin), Bob van Tiel (MUQTASP, ZAS Berlin)

Time and venue:
June 6th-7th, 2018 at ZAS Berlin, Room 403, 4rd floor (→Map)
How to get to ZAS!

The goal of this workshop is to bring together experimental and theoretical work on the pragmatics of quantifiers beyond “some” and “all”. In particular, we welcome submissions presenting work on the effects of quantification on implicature and presupposition.

Keynote speakers
Bart Geurts (University of Nijmegen), Martin Hackl (MIT), Napoleon Katsos (University of Cambridge) and Ora Matushansky (University of Paris VIII)

Description
While much work in pragmatics focuses on contrasts between “some” and “all”, most other quantifiers (even “most”) receive only scant attention in the literature. This holds for both implicature and for presupposition, especially presupposition projection. At the same time, the work that has been done indicates that there are important pragmatic differences between quantifiers. These differences affect, inter alia, the interpretation of donkey sentences (Kanazawa, 1994), cognitive and distributional profiles (Hackl, 2009 and Solt, 2016 on the difference between “most” and “more than half”), the order of acquisition (Katsos et al., 2016), the ease of logical inferencing (Geurts, 2003), the projection behaviour of presuppositions (Chemla, 2009), and the availability of scalar implicatures (Ariel, 2004).

Please register via e-mail to wesle@leibniz-zas.de!

Program

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Time Event
09:20-9:30 Welcome
09:30-10:30 Invited talk by Napoleon Katsos & Mieke Slim : “Preferences for ‘all…not’ scope readings across languages: a developmental perspective”
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-11:50 Anton Benz & Nicole Gotzner: “Implicature of complex sentences: a comprehensive study and model”
11:50-12:40 Stavroula Alexandropoulou, Jakub Dotlacil & Rick Nouwen: “Distinguishing comparative and superlative quantifiers: theory and experimental data”
12:40-14:30 Lunch break
14:30-15:20 Flora Lili Donati: “Different interpretations of lower-bound modified numerals in Hungarian”
15:20-16:10 Vinicius Macuch & Michael Franke: “Reading quantified expressions in context: does pragmatic surprisal or strategic attention allocation predict self-paced reading times?”
16:10-16:50 Coffee break
16:50-17:50 Invited talk by Ora Matushansky: “The syntax of modified numerals and the semantics of derived degrees”
18:30 Dinner at Restaurant Boulevard Berlin

Thursday, June 7, 2018

Time Event
09:30-10:30 Invited talk by Bart Geurts: “Implicatures without intentions”
10:30-11:00 Coffee break
11:00-11:50 Richard Breheny & Chao Sun: “Exploring the existential/universal ambiguity in singular donkey sentences”
11:50-12:40 Petra Augurzky, Fabian Schlotterbeck & Rolf Ulrich: “Most (but not all) quantifiers are interpreted immediately in visual context”
12:40-14:30 Lunch break
14:30-15:20 Mieke Slim & Napoleon Katsos: “Monolingual and bilingual priming of the logical form”
15:20-15:50 Uli Sauerland “Nonconservative uses of fractions”
15:50-16:20 Bob van Tiel, Michael Franke & Uli Sauerland “Speaking of quantifiers”
16:20-16:40 Coffee break (cancelled)
16:40-17:40 Invited talk by Martin Hackl (cancelled)