Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Tuesday, 19 June, 16:15
Conference Room, Building C7 4
Note: unusual date and time!

'Because' and 'if' gone astray: Semantic Operators in Different Dimensions"

This talk studies the different dimensions of meaning at which an operator can contribute its different semantic parts. I show semantic effects of the switch to a new dimension (outside of the assertion), and also some interesting structural reflexes of this move: In German, syntactic cues mark non-asserted content, a fact that still begs an explanation. Known tiers that meaning units can be associated with are the level of assertion (or ordinary meaning), the level of presuppositions, and the level of conventional implicatures.

I will investigate certain constructions that pose serious challenges for current semantic theory in that they call for a more articulated view of meaning and meaning composition. The constructions at issue are: (i) epistemic and speech-act uses of 'because'-clauses ("Peter ist zuhause, denn sein Licht ist an"), (ii) relevance conditionals ("If you're hungry, there's pizza in the fridge"), and (iii) German attitude verbs that allow verb-second clausal complements.

For both 'because'-clauses and relevance conditionals, I argue that the operator in question can either apply on the level of assertions (to yield a regular causal adjunct or a regular conditional), or it can apply on the level of conventional implicature, which produces an epistemic or speech-act because-clause and a relevance conditional, respectively. This analysis explains the peculiar semantic properties of the second (conventional implicature) type of clauses. Furthermore, I show that the semantic difference between the two levels of meaning goes hand in hand with interesting syntactic differences in German. It turns out that conventional implicature readings are only possible when the embedded adjunct clause is syntactically separated from the main clause.

Second, I turn to complement clauses, looking at the complements of attitude verbs in German. In German, some verbs unexpectedly allow their complements to be syntactically 'unembedded' (i.e., V2). I argue that the class of verbs that allows this is characterized by providing certain additional semantic components, not on the level of assertion.

Finally, this research leads to a discussion on how different levels of meaning interact or mix. Once clausal meaning is contributed as a conventional implicature, one could encounter presuppositions embedded in it, and vice versa. Thus, complex projection patterns can be studied.

A longer, if slightly outdated, discussion of this research project can be found in my dissertation proposal: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~tatjana/papers/scheffler-dissproposal.pdf.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Sebastian Pado.