Call for Abstracts

Abstract requirements

  • The abstrast is for a 30 minutes presentation.
  • The main text of the abstract should be at most 3 pages (Times New Roman, 12pt, 2.5cm margin).
  • References, figures and glossed examples may be added on additional pages exceeding the 3-page limit.
  • Abstracts should be anonymized and submitted in PDF format.
  • Deadline: September 15 2022, 12:00pm noon Eastern Standard Time.
    EXTENDED DEADLINE: September 22 2022, 12:00pm noon Eastern Standard Time.
  • Any questions may be sent to hnm1.workshop@aol.com
  • Submit to Easy Chair

Call

A long-standing observation (since at least Fodor 1970) is that in certain contexts, sentences containing plurals exhibit gaps between their truth and falsity conditions. If John read half of the books he was assigned, neither (1-a) nor (1-b) seems true; furthermore, in three-valued judgment tasks (Križ & Chemla 2015), speakers tend to judge sentences like (1-a) "neither completely true nor completely false" in such scenarios.

(1)
a. John read the books.
b. John didn't read the books.

This curious gap in meaning has been dubbed homogeneity. For definite plurals and type e conjunctions, homogeneity effects have been studied extensively and are attested in unrelated language families (e.g. Szabolcsi & Haddican 2004). But homogeneity effects have also been observed in other domains: mass and group nouns (Löbner 2000), generics (von Fintel 1997, Löbner 2000 a.o.), time (Agha 2021), embedded questions (Križ 2015; Blok & Chark 2021), conditionals (von Fintel 1997 a.o.), neg-raising predicates (Gajewski 2005), t-based conjunctions (Schmitt 2013), donkey anaphora (Krifka 1996, Champollion et al. 2019), clefts (Büring & Križ 2012) etc.

The stability and pervasiveness of homogeneity call for a general theory. Yet, despite extensive theoretical work (Schwarzschild 1994; Löbner 2000; Gajewski 2005; Križ 2015; Magri 2014; Križ & Spector 2021, Bar-Lev 2021), many things remain unknown, from the precise conditions under which homogeneity is found to its potential connection to other gappy phenomena.

Another set of open questions concerns the relation between homogeneity and imprecision or non-maximality: In some contexts, (1-a) can still be judged true if John read, say, 7 out of 10 assigned books (see Brisson (1998), Malamud (2012), Križ (2015), Burnett (2017) a.o. for discussion). Non-maximality is characteristic of plural definites, but absent in constructions like (2) that also lack homogeneity. This raises the question of whether homogeneity and non-maximality are due to the same underlying mechanism (see e.g. Križ 2015, Bar-Lev 2021, Križ & Spector 2021, Feinmann 2020 for discussion).

(2) John read all the books.

The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers working on homogeneity and non-maximality and start a discussion on some of the outstanding issues related to homogeneity and non-maximality. We invite contributions on any of the following problems:

  • Which semantic phenomena should be analyzed in terms of homogeneity, especially beyond the standard cases of definite plurals and conjunctions?

  • How does homogeneity project, i.e. how can the truth-value gaps of complex expressions be predicted from the truth-value gaps of their parts?

  • Do non-maximality and homogeneity have a common semantic source, and if so, how does the pragmatics of non-maximality constrain semantic theories of homogeneity?

  • Which semantic/pragmatic mechanisms give rise to homogeneity effects? How does homogeneity relate to presuppositions, scalar implicatures and other gappy phenomena?

  • What is the relation between homogeneity and vagueness? How, if at all, can we distinguish homogeneity-related gaps from borderline cases of scalar predicates like tall?

  • What is the semantics of homogeneity-canceling expressions? Which generalizations are there about the set of expressions that remove homogeneity?

  • What is the cross-linguistic landscape of homogeneity and non-maximality? Is there substantial cross-linguistic variation in this domain?

  • Which differences between child and adult language are there in the domain of non-maximality and homogeneity, and what are their theoretical consequences?

References

Agha, Omar. 2021. Plural reference and exception tolerance in the semantics of habituals. Presentation at SALT 31.

Bar-Lev, Moshe E. 2021. An implicature account of homogeneity and non-maximality. Linguistics and Philosophy 44(5). 1045--1097.

Blok, Dominique & Jordan Chark. 2021. Homogeneity and universal quantification in embedded questions. In P. G. Grosz, L. Martí, H. Pearson, Y. Sudo, and S. Zobel (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 25, pp. 148--168.

Brisson, Christine. 1998. Distributivity, maximality, and floating quantifiers. Rutgers University PhD dissertation.

Büring, Daniel & Manuel Križ. 2013. It's that, and that's it! Exhaustivity and homogeneity presuppositions in clefts (and definites). Semantics & Pragmatics 6(6), 1-29.

Burnett, Heather. 2017. Gradability in natural language. Logical and grammatical foundations (Oxford Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics 7). Oxford University Press.

Champollion, Lucas, Dylan Bumford and Robert Henderson. 2019. Donkeys under discussion. Semantics & Pragmatics 12(1).

Feinmann, Diego. 2020. Lexical Illusions, (Non-)Maximality, and Invisible Gaps. University of Sheffield PhD dissertation.

von Fintel, Kai. 1997. Bare Plurals, Bare Conditionals and Only. Journal of Semantics 14: 1-56.

Gajewski, Jon. 2005. Neg-Raising: Polarity and Presupposition. MIT PhD dissertation.

Fodor, Janet Dean. 1970. The linguistic description of opaque contexts. MIT PhD dissertation.

Krifka, Manfred. 1996. Pragmatic strengthening in plural predications and donkey sentences. In Teresa Galloway & Justin Spence (eds.), Proceedings of SALT VI, 136--153. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.

Križ, Manuel. 2015. Aspects of homogeneity in the semantics of natural language. University of Vienna PhD dissertation.

Križ, Manuel & Emmanuel Chemla. 2015. Two methods to find truth-value gaps and their application to the projection problem of homogeneity. Natural Language Semantics 23. 205--248.

Križ, Manuel & Benjamin Spector. 2021. Interpreting plural predication. Linguistics and Philosophy 44(5). 1131--1178.

Löbner, Sebastian. 2000. Polarity in natural language: Predication, quantification and negation in particular and characterizing sentences. Linguistics and Philosophy 23. 213--308.

Magri, Giorgio. 2014. An Account for the Homogeneity Effect Triggered by Plural Definites and Conjunction Based on Double Strengthening. In Salvatore Pistoia Reda (ed.), Pragmatics, Semantics and the Case of Scalar Implicatures, 99--145. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Malamud, Sophia A. 2012. The meaning of plural definites: A decision-theoretic approach. Semantics and Pragmatics 5(3). 1--58.

Schmitt, Viola. 2013. More pluralities. University of Vienna PhD dissertation.

Schwarzschild, Roger. 1994. Plurals, presuppositions and the sources of distributivity. Natural Language Semantics 2. 201--248.