The Tohoku University 21st Century COE Program in Humanities:
LBC Open Lecture Series Nos. 37 and 38:
Invited Lectures on Theoretical Linguistics: The Frontiers of Sematic Studies
3-6pm, Friday, 2 June 2006, Tohoku University, Sendai, 980-8576 Japan

東北大学21世紀COEプログラム（言語認知総合科学） 第37・38回公開講演会

理論言語学講演会：「意味論研究の最前線」

2006年6月2日（金）午後3時〜6時, 東北大学川内北キャンパス・マルチメディア棟６Ｆホール
Program
15:00- Opening Remarks 開会の挨拶  
 
Kei Yoshimoto, Tohoku University
吉本啓 教授（東北大学）
Invited Lecture 1
15:15-16:30
Christopher Potts, University of Massachusetts
クリストファー・ポッツ教授（マサチューセッツ大学）
16:30-16:45 Break  
Invited Lecture 2
16:45-18:00 Negative Polarity Items in Korean and Japanese: How Concession Works Behind
Chungmin Lee, Seoul National University
チュンミン・リー教授（ソウル国立大学）
 
Abstracts

The Expressive Dimension

This talk explores various dimensions of meaning in a setting in which individual syntactic nodes can have multiple independent meanings (Chierchia 2004, Potts 2005). Some dimensions are semantic, others pragmatic. Expressive content items like honorifics (Potts and Kawahara 2004), emotive attribute adjectives (e.g., 'damn'), and epithets blur this distinction, because they are lexical items whose content is strongly tied to the utterance situation. The independence of their content from the descriptive content suggests a dimension of meaning that blends semantic and pragmatic information. I identify five special properties of expressive content and develop a multidimensional, referential theory that properly captures this meaning--use blend. I close by exploring the limits of the proposed definition of expressive content.

Negative Polarity Items in Korean and Japanese: How Concession Works Behind

Monotone-decreasingness (Ladusaw 1979) and non-veridicality (Zwarts 1995) are nice function types to characterize the licensing contexts of NPIs and Free Choice Items (FCIs) but the former fails to account for weak NPIs and the latter for weakly negative predicates (turn off, remove, etc., see Joe and C. Lee 2001 J/K) and emotive factive predicates (lucky, etc.)(C. Lee 1999 UCLA Working Papers). Here we propose a unified solution in terms of concession. The majority of languages of the world such as Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Mongolian, Hindi, Zapotec and Basque form NPIs and FCIs by combining wh-based (otherwise, [any]-like) indefinites and concessives that denote the notion of concession, mostly equivalent to "even" in English (see Haspelmath 1993 [57 out of 100 languages are wh-based] and others for facts). In all languages, the lowest indefinite natural number "one" or a minimizer accompanied by a concessive also forms an NPI. This type is quantitative and can be explained by Horn (1972) and Fauconnier's (1975) scales, which, I claim, are triggered by concession. Going down to the lower bound for the easiest (or likeliest) on a contextually relevant scale of graded , a higher or the maximized quantity does not hold either and the consequent emphatic total negation is what the speaker means to convey. For the former wh-based type, which is qualitative, concession is made by arbitrary choice. However arbitrarily, property-wise, you may choose a member, up to maximization, from the wh-domain (the most arbitrary way is the easiest), if it is not the case with the relevant proposition, it is an NPI, and if it is the case in uncertain but modally maximally possible contexts, it is an FCI, but if it is the case in uncertain but modally existentially possible contexts, it is a weak NPI. A wh-question is a set of alternative answers as (true) propositions (Hamblin 1973 and Karttunen 1974) and an indefinite from it can stand for any (arbitrary) non-specific member of the same set (as in a choice function). I call the set of individuals etc. that correspond to the wh-information focus a wh-domain. The wh-based NPIs, however, are indefinite wh-forms with Concessives (CNC), not interrogative wh-words, contrary to claims made in the literature. This talk will show in Korean and Japanese how the notion of concession is central to understand polarity and how compositionally as well as intensionally polarity-related phenomena can be resolved.