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Making Worlds Accessible. Essays in Honor of Angelika Kratzer University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Angelika Kratzer Festschrift Angelika Kratzer FestSite 2020 Making Worlds Accessible. Essays in Honor of Angelika Kratzer Rajesh Bhatt University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Ilaria Frana University of Enna "Kore", [email protected] Paula Menéndez-Benito University of Tubingen̈ , [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/ak_festsite_schrift Recommended Citation Bhatt, Rajesh; Frana, Ilaria; and Menéndez-Benito, Paula, "Making Worlds Accessible. Essays in Honor of Angelika Kratzer" (2020). Angelika Kratzer Festschrift. 1. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/ak_festsite_schrift/1 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Angelika Kratzer FestSite at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Angelika Kratzer Festschrift by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Making Worlds Accessible ESSAYS IN HONOR OF Angelika Kratzer EDITED BY RAJESH BHATT ILARIA FRANA PAULA MENÉNDEZ-BENITO Contents Editors i Contributors ii Preface iii 1. Death on the Freeway: imaginative resistance as narrator accommodation 1 Daniel Altshuler and Emar Maier 2. A comparative note on the Bangla particle to and the German particle doch 17 Josef Bayer 3. The child in semantics 32 Valentine Hacquard 4. “Relative pronouns” as agreeing complementizers: German welch- 47 Dalina Kallulli 5. Attitude embedding predicates and indexicals under role shift in ASL 59 Elena Koulidobrova and Kathryn Davidson 6. Universal NPs, distributivity and dependent indefinites in Mandarin Chinese 72 Jo-Wang Lin 7. Quotes as complements: A Kratzerian approach 91 Emar Maier 8. Clauses as semantic predicates: difficulties for possible-worlds semantics 101 Friederike Moltmann 9. Silent anchors: the case for unpronounced indexicality 118 Orin Percus 10. Do Italian factives entail their presupposition? Yes, but. 150 Florian Schwarz, Kajsa Djärv and Jérémy Zehr 11. The representation of Focus, Givenness and Exhaustivity 167 Roger Schwarzschild 12. Three puzzles about de se 193 Hazel Pearson and Thomas Roeper Editors Rajesh Bhatt, Professor of Linguistics, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst Ilaria Frana, Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Enna “Kore” Paula Menéndez-Benito, faculty member, University of Tübingen i Contributors Daniel Altshuler, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Hampshire College Josef Bayer, Professor of Linguistics, University of Konstanz Kathryn Davidson, Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Harvard University Kajsa Djärv, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Konstanz Valentine Hacquard, Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Maryland Dalina Kallulli, Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of Vienna Elena Koulidobrova, Associate Professor of English, Central Connecticut State University Jo-Wang Lin, Distinguished Research Fellow and Director of the Institute of Linguis- tics, Academia Sinica Emar Maier, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics, University of Gronin- gen Friederike Moltmann, Research Director (DR1), Centre National de la Recherche Sci- entifique (CNRS) Hazel Pearson, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, Queen Mary University of London Orin Percus, Professor at the Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes, CNRS / Univer- sité de Nantes Thomas Roeper, Professor of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst Florian Schwarz, Associate Professor of Linguistics, the University of Pennsylvania Roger Schwarzschild, Professor of Linguistics, MIT Jérémy Zehr, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Linguistics, the University of Penn- sylvania Cover image by Orin Percus ii Preface Every linguist knows how colossal Angelika’s impact on our field is. Hearing about this would not be informative for anybody who might (virtually) pick up this volume, including Angelika herself. So, instead of writing about, say, Angelika’s crucial role in the development of our understanding of modality, we will write about what Angelika means to us, as a teacher, advisor, mentor, colleague, and friend. We know that these words will resonate with many of you (Angelika has meant so much to so many people). We just get to be the lucky ones to tell Angelika publicly. Ilaria: When I was still a confused undergraduate in Italy applying for graduate programs in the US, I settled on UMass because of Angelika. When the time came during our first year to form a committee for our generals paper, I naturally went to her, who - also very naturally - turned me down. That could have been the end of the story (and the end of me). But it wasn’t; I thought she had her reasons. Although I was a pretty good student in her class, she hadn’t had the time to assess me outside routine homework assignments, and this is when I learnt something important about Angelika: she takes everyone and everything very seriously. So, I wrote my first generals paper in psycholinguistics instead (my second was in semantics; I did convince her in the end). Through the years, I found out many other things about Angelika’s views that I tried to incorporate into my own, and I don’t mean just about semantics. I learnt that every student and every student’s project matters, that being a honest advisor is as important as being a supportive one, that it is extremely important to recognize others’ contribution to the discussion of a topic as you carve your space into it, that as a woman in academia one should not feel obliged to always be pedagogical and that, as a researcher in general, the best one can do is to become acquainted with the condition of ‘groping in the dark’. The list could go on, but I will stop here. I hope to have done some justice to the wonderful and affectionate colleague that Angelika has been to everyone of us. Paula: I would not have become a semanticist if not for Angelika, and I don’t think I would have stayed one if not for her. She took me in at a time when I was an outsider in the department (and trying to learn semantics on the side), and has never failed to support me since. Throughout the whole dissertation writing process she took my work as seriously as if it were her own (and held me to the same standards she would herself). She worked alongside me during that long, hot, stress-filled, summer, and even drove to Northampton once to discuss the final touches of the dissertation (so that I would not waste precious hours on the trip to Amherst and back!). And, afterwards, when her advisor work was officially done, she was still there for me at every step of the way. During all this time, I have learned so many things from her. In her graduate classes I learnt what ‘research in action’ was, and what ‘striving for the truth’ really meant. Her undergraduate classes showed me that one could fascinate beginners without sacrificing rigour. She encouraged me (all of us) to pursue bold hypotheses but to follow them through carefully and systematically. She showed me how one could support one’s students to incredible extremes without fulfilling iii dangerous gender stereotypes (‘women in academia are expected to be mothers, men are expected to be brilliant’, she warned me once). I could not have wished for a more brilliant, generous, amazing advisor, mentor, and friend. Thank you, Angelika. Rajesh: Angelika has been a dear friend, a valued colleague, and a source of inspiration and support. I am not sure I would have come to UMass if it had not been for her encouragement. I have always loved Angelika’s excitement and her mind which has shown me new things which I hadn’t thought were possible. Angelika is never afraid of the new, of the unknown. She is not one who relishes the comforts of the familiar. Getting to see her think has been one of the highlights of my career so far. On a more quotidian note, I am grateful to her for not one but two sacher tortes from Vienna and for running a cafe in her office, which I am happy to report is still functional under a new administration. iv Death on the Freeway: Imaginative resistance as narrator accommodation* Daniel Altshuler Emar Maier Hampshire College University of Groningen Abstract We propose to analyze well-known cases of ‘imaginative resistance’ from the philosophical literature as involving the inference that particular content should be attributed to either: (i) a character rather than the narrator or, (ii) an unreliable, irrational, opinionated, and/or morally deviant ‘first person’ narrator who was originally perceived to be a typical impersonal, omniscient, ‘effaced’ narrator. We model the latter type of attribution in terms of two independently motivated linguistic mechanisms: accommodation of a discourse referent and ‘cautious’ updating as a model of non-cooperative information exchange. 1 Introduction Consider the following fictional discourse from Weatherson (2004): (1) Jack and Jill were arguing again. This was not in itself unusual, but this time they were standing in the fast lane of I-95 having their argument. This was causing traffic to bank up a bit. It wasn’t significantly worse than normally happened around Providence, not that you could have told that from the reactions of passing motorists. They were convinced that Jack and Jill, and not the volume of traffic, were the primary causes of the slowdown. They all forgot how bad traffic normally is along there. When Craig saw that the cause of the bankup had been Jack and Jill, he took his gun out of the glovebox and shot them. People then started driving over their bodies, and while the new speed hump caused some people to slow down a bit, mostly traffic returned to its normal speed. So Craig did the right thing, because Jack and Jill should have taken their argument somewhere else where they wouldn’t get in anyone’s way. * We would like to thank Angelika Kratzer for sponsoring Emar’s visit to UMass, Amherst during the 2017 fall semester – an opportunity that led to this collaborative effort.
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  • 1 Semantics in Generative Grammar. by Irene Heim & Angelika Kratzer
    Semantics in generative grammar. By Irene Heim & Angelika Kratzer. Malden & Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Pp. ix, 324. Introduction to natural language semantics. By Henriëtte de Swart. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 1998. Pp. xiv, 257. Although there aren’t that many text books on formal semantics, their average quality is quite good, and these two recent additions don’t lower the standard by any means. ‘Semantics in generative grammar’ (SGG) is the more innovative of the two. As its title indicates, SGG focuses its attention on the syntax/semantics interface, with particular emphasis on quantification and anaphora. These two subjects are discussed in considerable detail, while many others receive only a cursory treatment or are not addressed at all. We learn from the preface that this was a deliberate choice: ‘We want to help students develop the ability for semantic analysis, and, in view of this goal, we think that exploring a few topics in detail is more effective than offering a bird’s-eye view of everything.’ (p. ix) Having enjoyed the results of Heim and Kratzer’s explorations, I can only agree with this judgment. SGG falls into three main parts. The first part introduces the two notions that are at the heart of the formal semantics enterprise, viz. truth conditions and compositionality, and then goes on to develop a compositional truth- conditional semantics for a core fragment of English. The second part discusses variable binding and quantification, and the third part is an in-depth discussion of anaphora. All these developments are kept within an extensional framework. 06-09-1999 1 Intensional phenomena are addressed only briefly, in the last chapter of the book.
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