Example Internal Workshop

The origin of bias in questions: Semantics and pragmatics
Manfred Krifka, Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft

I will summarize recent research on the bias of different types of polar questions and then turn to the issue how these biased interpretations come about. I will argue that that they from a combination of the morphosyntactic and prosodic marking of the questions, interpreted compositionally as updates of the common ground, which I model by commitment spaces. I will also discuss pragmatic principles that lead to the biased interpretations. I will attempt to minimize non-predictable, idiomaticized interpretations, but do not rule them out in principle. My focus will be mostly on German, and will include alternative questions, high and low negated questions, declarative questions, questions with epistemic particles, question tags, combinations of assertions and questions, and incredulity questions.

Non-culminating accomplishments in English and German: A cross-linguistic reading time study
B01 talk by Oliver Bott, Jens Michaelis and Torgrim Solstad

We present the results of a crosslinguistic study on the interpretation and processing of aspectual coercion in the case of non-culminating accomplishments in English and German, a topic recently discussed both in semantics and pragmatics as well as in psycholinguistics. The semantic properties of the constructions were investigated in a rating task. In particular, two offline experiments employing a telicity inference rating task showed that non-culminating accomplishments in both languages actually involve a shift in interpretation. To study the processing consequences of these shifts in meaning, a total of five online processing experiments were conducted. Four self-paced reading experiments show that this type of coercion isn't costly - neither in German, a language lacking grammatical aspect, nor in English with an aspectual opposition between progressive and perfective forms. This lack of effect in processing coercion was obtained in a first pair of experiments using adverbial modification (sentence-internally) within the verb phrase and in a second pair of experiments in which aspectual coercion was triggered in a subsequent discourse unit. A final stops-making-sense experiment replicates the lack of effect for English and furthermore shows that the processing of non-culminating accomplishments does not incur a processing effect even in a task calling for immediate full interpretation. Taken together, the findings of our study provide evidence for smooth transitions in aspectual interpretation as afforded by the sentence but also the larger discourse context.

Coercion and compositionality: a semantic-minimalist account
Roberto G. de Almeida, Concordia University

In linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience, it is almost a consensus that understanding a putatively indeterminate sentence such as “Mary began a book” entails a process by which the nominal complement is “coerced” into an activity or that there is some form of interpolation in semantic composition, thus licensing an interpretation such as “Mary began reading a book”. Numerous linguistic and experimental studies have suggested that this process relies, to a large extent, on the information contained in the lexical representation of “book,” which provides the filler event to yield an enriched semantic composition. In this talk, I will argue against this view and for a simple, minimalist account of compositionality. The reasons are numerous, some are classic: any account of compositionality that rests on lexical-semantic features, hidden (and non-structurally-motivated) predicates, or nominal interpolation stands on a yet to be provided analytic/synthetic distinction. I will show, moreover, that psycholinguistic evidence for coercion is slim at best; that coercion effects stemming from psycholinguistic studies (e.g., longer reading times for “coerced” constructions) do not constitute evidence for semantic interpolation nor type-shifting; and that linguistic analysis of indeterminate sentences can account for much of the coercion effects in terms of structurally-determined positions which might serve as triggers for pragmatic enrichment.  I will discuss psycholinguistic and fMRI experiments suggesting that attempts to resolve indeterminacy rely on pragmatic rather than on lexical-semantic decompositional processes.

Biased polar questions: A cross-linguistic study
B03 talk by Maryam Mohammadi, René Nicolas, Arndt Riester & Nori Hayashi

A central motivation for the use of polar questions are contexts in which there is a mismatch between a speaker’s background information (the original bias) and inferences drawn from evidence observed or verbally obtained within the current context (the contextual bias). Speakers adapt the form of their polar questions depending on a number of variables. Among these we find the strength of the gathered contextual evidence to be prominent. We present some descriptive data concerning the realisation of polar questions within different contexts in three languages: Farsi, German and Japanese.

Warming-up Dinner (19:00) @The Bernstein, Niederwall 2 (Bielefeld city centre)

Room Morning Session: D3-121 (main building)

Room Afternoon Session: UHG D3-121 (main building)

Workshop Dinner (19:00) @L'Arabesque, August-Bebel-Str. 47 (Bielefeld city centre)

Room Morning Session: UHG S0-209 (main building)

Room Afternoon Session: UHG S1-209 (main building)