December 7, 2015

Research Groups: Friday, December 11

9:30 AM - 11:00 AM
Phonetics/Phonology Group
Paper discussion led by Radu Craioveanu (Ph.D.): Morley, Rebecca (2015). Deletion or epenthesis? On the falsifiability of linguistic universals. Lingua, 154, 1-26.

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Language Variation and Change Group
Derek Denis (Ph.D. 2015, now at the University of Victoria) presenting a workshop on plotting in R using the ggplot package.

12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Semantics Group
Tomohiro Yokoyama (Ph.D.): "Evidence as the presupposition of wh-exclamatives in English."

This paper makes a novel proposal regarding wh-exclamatives in English. In the literature, the main contention is whether exclamatives presuppose their propositional content. This paper argues that what is actually presupposed by wh-exclamatives is not their propositional content but rather that the speaker has first-hand evidence for the proposition. For example, the presupposed content of "What a good book John wrote!" is not that John wrote a very good book but that the speaker has read John's book. This analysis explains different behaviors of wh-exclamatives including their inability to be embedded under certain phrases such as "I don't know".

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