McLing

Speaker: E. Allyn Smith

When: Wednesday, 10/17, 12:35 – 1:25

Title: What you cannot deny

Abstract: Presuppositions, Conventional Implicatures, ‘not-at-issue’ meanings and meanings explicitly relativized to the speaker are all thought to be infelicitous with direct denial, here defined as the ability to say “No,…” in response to a statement.  I will talk about some recent results from an experiment testing the direct deniability of all of these meaning types and some subtypes thereof.  I will also talk about some interesting findings related to the kind of denial preferred with various meaning types.

Schedule for the rest of the semester:
October 24: Brandon Fry (U of Ottawa), Particle verbs, principled explanation and PF
October 31: Jeffrey Klassen (McGill), Acquisition of focus prosody
November 7: Matthew Masapollo (McGill), Infants’ processing of vowels with infant vocal tract parameters
November 14: AVAILABLE TIME SLOT*
November 21: Tanya Slavin (McGill), Topic TBA
November 28: Robert Henderson & Jessica Coon (McGill), Agent focus in Mayan

*Contact us at linglunch@gmail.com if you’d like to present.