Speaker Series

The Linguistics Speaker Series is a series of invited talks, organized each semester by the grad students in the Penn Department of Linguistics. We invite students and professors from various subfields and various universities to speak about their current research. All talks are open to the greater Penn linguistics community.

For Spring 2012, the speaker series is organized by Jingjing Tan. You can see a list of past speakers here.

Schedule

Talks are held on Thursday afternoons in the IRCS Large Conference Room unless otherwise indicated. IRCS is at 3401 Walnut Street, 4th floor, suite 400A. Make two lefts out of the elevators, and the Large Conference Room is the very first door on the left within IRCS, room 470 (Directions and Map)

Announcements of talks are posted below, in the department, and to the Penguists mailing list.

3:00-3:30 Pre-Talk Reception and Refreshment

3:30-4:30 Talk

4:30-5:00 Question and Answer Period

Speakers for Spring 2012:

January 19 - Muffy Siegel, Temple University
March 1 - Matt Wolf , Yale University
March 29 - Alexander Williams, University of Maryland
April 5 - Yi-Ting Huang, University of Maryland
April 19 - Molly Diesing, Cornell University

January 19 - Muffy Siegel, Temple University

In Your Dreams: Lexical Worlds of Evaluation

Responses like "in your dreams" and "on some other planet" (IYDs) can implicate that a previous contribution is false. I argue that IYDs represent possible, epistemically inaccessible worlds relative to which we re-evaluate previously asserted or pragmatically constructed propositions. IYDs are focus-marked, evoking a set of alternative evaluation worlds and identifying the default actual world as focus antecedent. That is, p might be true in the IYD world, but it is not true in @. Since this characteristic IYD denial reading disappears whenever the world invoked is epistemically accessible from @, I provide a formal rule to generate IYDs only from focused world expressions that have no salient actual-world referent. I also show that other initially plausible approaches to IYDs, including scalar implicature and modal fictional worlds, fail. In contrast, my analysis correctly predicts IYDso wide scope, their inability to self-embed, and their extensionality. The analysis of IYDs provides support for world-of-evaluation variables in the grammar and for the evocation of alternatives as the core effect of a generalized focus. Most unexpectedly, the analysis also shows that a lexical item can be assigned as its denotation the member of W that is acting as the evaluation world for interpreting the utterance.