Talks/Events
The UCLA Linguistics Department proudly sponsors a wide range of research talks. Our flagship series is the Linguistics Colloquium, which includes distinguished visiting speakers and is addressed to a general audience of linguists. Specialist talks cover a variety of areas, and are most often given by in-house speakers.
If you want to look at just the schedule for some particular talk series, select the series from the drop-down menu below.
If you can't find the schedule you need, please find who is the convenor for this quarter in the Schedule of Classes, and contact the convenor by email.
If you are responsible for organizing a talk series and want to learn how you can change these schedules, visit this page.
| Special talk: Yoad Winter, "Property descriptions in locative PP's" |
|
|
|
Wednesday, March 07, 2012, 1:00AM - 2:30PM
|
|
During a long drive in the desert, you suddenly notice that your car has run out of gas. Your companion says:
(1) Don’t worry: we're close to a gas station.
He or she might also say:
(2) Oh no: we're far from a gas station.
Sentence (1) has positive implications for the fate of your journey. It involves an effect similar to existential quantification: “there exists a gas station nearby”. This is not the case in (2), where the prominent, unfavorable, interpretation is similar to universal quantification: “we are far from all gas stations”.
While meanings of quantificational and spatial expressions have been extensively studied in isolation, interactions between them as in (1) and (2) have rarely been researched. This talk will account for some previously unexplored interactions of this sort. Effects of quantificational variability as in (1)-(2) with indefinites in spatial PP complements will be accounted for using a theory of semantic incorporation (Zimmermann 1993 and others), couched within a general semantics of spatial PPs (Zwarts and Winter 2000).
Similar contrasts appear with other spatial predicates and in/definite objects, singular and plural:
(3) a. This house is close to lakes. (=some lakes/one lake)
b. This house is far from lakes. (=all lakes)
(4) a. This district contains the industrial zone. (=whole zone)
b. This district borders/overlaps the industrial zone. (=part of the zone)
(5) a. Mary circled the houses. (=all the houses)
b. Mary reached the houses. (=some of the houses/one house)
I will argue that such (pseudo) quantificational variability is generally accounted for as a result of the spatial-mereological structures of in/definite NPs, treated as direct arguments of spatial functions.
Joint work with Sela Mador-Haim.
References
Zimmermann, T. E. (1993). "On the proper treatment of opacity in certain verbs". Natural Language Semantics 1:149-179.
Zwarts J. and Y. Winter (2000). "Vector Space Semantics: a model-theoretic analysis of locative prepositions". Journal of Logic, Language and Information 9:169-211. |
Location : Phonetics classroom
Contact : Ed Keenan |
Back
|
Talks and Events
All repeats