The New Sesquipedalian

This afternoon we will hear a stirring presentation on “Coherent contexts: Dynamic reasoning with aspectual information” from Alice ter Meulen (U Geneva) in the Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop at 1:15pm in the Greenberg room. Curiously, there is also a Colloquium on precisely the same topic with the same speaker in the same room at the same time. Don’t miss either of these! The abstract for the Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop and the Colloquium is below:

The dynamic semantics of aspectual adverbs first contrasts English, German and Dutch data, using respectively prosody, word order and composition to add subjective information to factual description. It is subsequently applied to dialogue, conditionals and interrogative contexts. The observed linguistic variety in aspectual quantification is analyzed in terms of focus and information structure. The temporal meaning of aspectual adverbs blends into meta-linguistic uses where generic background constraints may support the current context to create coherence, considering apparent counterexamples to be exceptions. This DRT semantics is claimed to provide adequate representational tools to account for the observed inferences, obviating tailor-made default inference or externally characterized ‘normal’ worlds.