※ 清華語言所新048次專題演講公告 ※

講者：Professor Tue Trinh (University of Wisconsin-Milwakee )

題目：In defense of structural alternatives 

日期：2018年1月5日 (星期五)

時間：中午12時30分 開始

地點：人社院 B305研討室

摘要：It has been observed that implicatures licensed by (the utterance of) a sentence S depend not only on the meaning of S but also on its syntactic structure. This phenomenon motivates the “grammatical approach” to implicatures which take these to be entailments deduced from compositional semantics, not pragmatic inferences drawn from reasoning about the speaker's belief. The approach presupposes a notion of “alternatives,” sentences which could have been used instead of the one that was used, that are distinctly formal: alternatives of S must be syntactically related to S. This talk explores what that relation is. I will present some facts which pose a challenge for recent theories of alternatives, and provide an account for them in the spirit of the grammatical approach to implicatures.