Events in 2016

Ideophones are a grammatically distinguished class of expressions in a language that specialize in depicting sensory imagery (Dingemanse 2011: p. 25; 2012). This talk develops a formal semantics of ideophones that can account for their meaning and compositional properties. I propose an analysis that extends work in Davidson 2015, whose demonstration-based framework provides a formal foundation for the semantics of ideophones that captures the difference between description and depiction, the kind of meaning ideophones traffic in. The talk then shows how the demonstration-based account can be use to analyze pluractionality in the ideophone domain. In particular, case studies I show that there are two previously unrecognized types of ideophonic pluractionality, and that their properties support the demonstration-based account. The first, which I call “demonstration-external pluractionality”, involves a speaker using an ideophone to do a plurality of demonstrations that characterize a plurality of events. The second kind of ideophonic pluractionality, which I call a “demonstration-internal pluractionality”, is much more similar to pluractionality in the verbal domain, and involves special morphology that derives ideophone stems that can only be used to demonstrate plural events. Finally, I use the contrast between these two types of pluractionality in the ideophone domain to investigate the line between iconic and non-iconic aspects of the semantics of ideophones.

Many accounts of language assume that communication is inherently Gricean, and thus that contextually enriched meanings depend in part on a sensitivity to speaker states. However, current models of how core semantic phenomena interact with context often ignore speakerspecific information. For example, in the case of gradable adjectives, research on this topic has mainly focused on the role of extra-linguistic context, such as the distribution of a feature across a domain, or informativeness.

Here, we ask whether, in addition to statistical distributions, listener’s standards of comparison for adjectives are also sensitive to thresholds communicated by (a) existential presuppositions, to investigate whether listeners accommodate individual differences, and (b) different adjective orderings, to test whether the compositional operations involved in understanding AAN-sequences can help comprehenders decide whether scalar thresholds are affected by the speaker’s statements. The results are jointly informative for recent discussions of scalar vs. absolute adjectives, the question of how scalar thresholds are computed, and the compositional semantics of multi-adjective sequences.