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Weekly Digest, 10/21/22
We’re back! And we have a bunch of news from over fall break to catch up on and more news for the coming week as well!
If you have news to share, please submit your news for future issues of SCling Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s fresh at USC Linguistics.
Upcoming Colloquium: Paul Portner
Please join us for Paul Portner’s colloquium on Monday 10/24 @ 3:30pm in the conference room (and hybrid on zoom).
Paul Portner, Georgetown University
Monday 10/24, 3:30pm
Appropriate Subject Matters
The SOCIAL RELATION between a speaker and addressee plays an important role in determining what is presupposed in their conversation and what are appropriate things to say in the conversation. Indeed, it seems to me that language users’ judgments concerning these presuppositions are clearer than the most of the presuppositions we ordinarily study in formal linguistics. While semanticists may be skeptical about the idea that judgments of this kind should be modeled within semantic/pragmatic theory, I claim that they should. In support of this, I argue that the analysis of certain SPEECH ACT ADVERBS (Schreiber 1972, Sadock 1974, Krifka 2021, Mittwoch 1977, Ifantidou-Trouki 1993, Potts 2005, a.o.) requires a model of how social relations influence the structure and content of the common ground. For instance, frankly (as a speech act adverb) expresses that the upcoming conversational move is made without regard to whether it is appropriate given the standing social relation, and signals the speaker’s proposal to shift the structure of the common ground to one where it is appropriate.
• Frankly I don’t care where the truth of this single deed lies, because it lies not with these soldiers. It is a tragedy and the rest of the nation and you too bear the blame. (COCA, Davies 2008-)
I propose a model of the appropriateness in discourse based on Lewis’s (1988) notion of a SUBJECT MATTER and an analysis of speech act adverbs based on that model. I will also touch on other ways in which the subject matters based on social relation might play a role in semantic theory, in particular in the analysis of imperatives and deontic modals, and discuss the relation between this type of social relation and the meanings associated with honorifics and allocutive markers.
Inked ✍️
Travis Major. 2022. “Revisiting the Syntax of Monsters in Uyghur.” Linguistic Inquiry. Link to paper.
Look Who’s Talking 🗣
Travis Major gave a colloquium talk at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee on Oct. 14. His talk was titled “‘Say’-complementation: re-analyzing Lubukusu complementizer agreement.”
Luismi Toquero Pérez gave a talk at UCLA’s Syntax-Semantics seminar titled “The syntax and semantics of number neutral NPs in Alasha Mongolian” on Oct. 12.
Luismi Toquero Pérez gave a joint talk with Carol-Rose Little (U. Oklahoma) titled “Degree constructions in Ch’ol” at the 12th Workshop on the Semantics of Under-represented Languages of the Americas (SULA 12), hosted at the University of Ottawa Oct. 13-16.
At the Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) at UCLA this coming weekend:
Elango Kuraman will give a talk titled “Adjustable word edges and weight-sensitive stress.”
Rachel Walker (UCSC) and recent USC PhD Yifan Yang will give a poster titled “Temporal Coordination and Markedness in Moenat Ladin Consonant Clusters.”
Grad student social at Dockweiler
The grad students met at Dockweiler Beach for an evening of socializing in the sand. For some of the students, this was their first bonfire ever!
Upcoming Events
Monday 10/20, 1pm @ PhonLunch: AMP reports.
Monday 10/20, 3:30pm: Department Colloquium, Paul Portner (Georgetown), “Appropriate Subject Matters”
Tuesday 10/25, 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Esra Eldem on “Morphological Decomposition in Heritage Turkish Speakers in the U.S.: Evidence from a Masked Priming Experiment”
Wednesday 10/26, 1pm @ Linguistics Teaching Reading group: Discussion of Zuraw et al. 2019
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