Proceedings of the Fifteenth Amsterdam Colloquium December 19 — 21, 2005 Proceedings of the Fifteenth Amsterdam Colloquium December 19 — 21, 2005 Paul Dekker and Michael Franke (eds.) ILLC/Department of Philosophy University of Amsterdam Printed by Grafisch Centrum Amsterdam Cover design by Crasborn Grafisch Ontwerpers bno ISBN: 90-5776 1467 Preface The 2005 edition of the Amsterdam Colloquium is the Fifteenth in a series which started in 1976. Originally, the Amsterdam Colloquium was an initiative of the De- partment of Philosophy of the University of Amsterdam. Since 1984 the Colloquium is organized by the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam. These proceedings contain the abstracts of the papers presented at the colloquium. In the first section one can find abstracts of the talks given by some of the invited speakers, Sigrid Beck and Nissim Francez (joint talk with Gilad Ben-Avi). The next two sections contain contributions to the two workshops: ! Language and Learning ! Semantic Universals The fourth section consists of the contributions to the general program. In all cases the copyright resides with the individual authors. For the organization of the Fifteenth Amsterdam Colloquium financial support is received from: • the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW) • the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) • the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) • the NWO-funded project ‘Formal Language Games’ • Springer • the city of Amsterdam which is gratefully acknowledged. The organizers would like to thank the authors for their contribution and of course the members of the program committee for the great job they have done: ! (local committee) Johan van Benthem, Martin Stokhof (chair), Henk Zeevat ! (the invited speakers) Sigrid Beck, Nissim Francez, Manfred Krifka, Lawrence S. Moss ! (external committee) David Beaver, Bart Geurts, Jack Hoeksema, Marcus Kracht, Angelika Kratzer, Michael Moortgat, Henriette de Swart, Ede Zimmermann The Editors Amsterdam, November 2005 v Contents Preface . v Contents . vii Invited Speakers . 1 A second time and again Sigrid Beck . 3 Proof-theoretic semantics for a syllogistic fragment Gilad Ben Avi and Nissim Francez . 9 Workshop on Language and Learning . 15 Locality and the order of acquisition steps Jacqueline van Kampen . 17 Workshop on Semantic Universals . 23 Prohibitives: why two thirds of the world’s languages are unlike Dutch Johan van der Auwera . 25 Association: a cross-linguistic experiment David Gil . 31 Case and strength Helen de Hoop . 33 How much logic is built into natural language? Ed Keenan . 39 General Program . 45 Focus and negative concord in Hungarian A´ gnes Bende-Farkas . 47 Dynamic situations: accounting for Dowty’s inertia notion using dynamic semantics Ido Ben-Zvi . 53 Exhaustivity, homogeneity and definiteness Richard Breheny . 59 Complex anaphors — ontology and resolution Manfred Consten and Mareile Knees . 65 Comic relief for anankastic conditionals Tim Fernando . 71 vii Achieving expressive completeness and computational efficiency for underspecified scope representations Chris Fox and Shalom Lappin . 77 How and how not to employ discourse relations to account for pseudo-imperatives Michael Franke . 83 Agency and case: a lattice-based framework Scott Grimm . 89 Dynamic Wh-terms Andreas Haida . 95 Contrastives and Gricean principle Yurie Hara . 101 Inference, ellipsis and deaccenting Daniel Hardt . 107 Asymmetries in language use reveal asymmetries in the grammar Petra Hendriks, Helen de Hoop and Monique Lamers . 113 A presuppositional account of indexicals Julie Hunter and Nicholas Asher . 119 Independence friendly logic as a strategic game Theo M.V. Janssen . 125 When ‘widening’ is too narrow Jacques Jayez and Lucia Tovena . 131 Scalar use of Only in conditionals Sveta Krasikova and Ventsislav Zhechev . 137 Donald Duck is back, and he speaks Spanish Luisa Mart´ı . 143 A compositional semantics for locatives Ce´cile Meier . 149 Comparatives without degrees: a new approach Friederike Moltmann . 155 Synonymy, common knowledge, and the social construction of meaning Reinhard Muskens . 161 Monotone amazement Rick Nouwen . 167 Polarity items in before clauses Francesca Panzeri . 173 Almost: a test? Doris Penka . 179 Semantics of possessive determiners Stanley Peters and Dag Westersta˚hl . 185 viii Determiners in aspectual composition Christopher Pin˜o´n . 191 Scope disambiguation by ellipsis and focus without scope economy Mats Rooth . 197 The helping-effect of dative case Antonia Rothmayr . 203 Against partitioned readings of reciprocals Sivan Sabato and Yoad Winter . 209 Syntax and semantics of causal denn in German Tatjana Scheffler . 215 The role of lists in a categorial analysis of coordination Michael Schiehlen . 221 Transparency: an incremental account of presupposition projection Philippe Schlenker . 227 Exhaustive imperatives Magdalena Schwager . 233 Word meaning, unification and sentence-internal pragmatics Torgrim Solstad . 239 Causative constructions and aspectual meanings: a case study from Semitic deriva- tional morphology Reut Tsarfaty . 245 ix Invited Speakers A SECOND TIME AND AGAIN SIGRID BECK Englisches Seminar Universität Tübingen [email protected] This paper considers focus alternatives to presuppositional elements like again. We observe that there are empirical differences between again and its non-presuppositional counterpart a second time. A general question is raised about presuppositions in alternative sets. 1. Introduction It has been observed that the discourse behaviour of focused again differs from that of unfocused again (Fabricius-Hansen 1983, Kamp & Rossdeutscher 1994, among others). An example taken from Beck (to appear) is given in (1) (imagine somebody reading through a long list of former US presidents). (1) a. Smith was a Republican, Jones was a Republican, Longbottom was a Republican AGAIN b. Smith was a Republican, Jones was not a Republican, Longbottom was a Republican again/ *AGAIN Recent discussion of several interesting aspects of this problem is found e.g. in Klein 2001 and Beck (to appear). Here I will simply raise the question of the focus semantic contribution of a presuppositional element like again. Observe that again does not license the same contrast relationships as the non-presuppositional, but otherwise semantically parallel a second time/for the second time. Hence again and a second time must introduce different focus alternatives. (2) a. ?? Peter is in Rome for the first time & Paul (is) AGAIN. b. Peter is in Rome for the first time & Paul (is) for the SECOND time. Section 2 discusses the effect of focus on again in more detail, and introduces a second purely presuppositional element, also. Section 3 generalizes the question about presupposition (ff: psp) in alternative sets. Conclusions are drawn in section 4. 3 Sigrid Beck 2. Focus on Purely Presuppositional Items 2.1. Again I will work with the (simplified) semantics in (3) for again. I suggest that typical focus alternatives (ff: FAlts) to again are a semantically empty adverb (i.e. the identity function of the relevant type) and still. There may be further plausible FAlts like (not) yet and (not) anymore (thanks to Graham Katz for pointing this out). It is also likely that the set of FAlts varies with context. I will concentrate on the semantically empty adverb and still. Let ALTx be the set of contextually relevant focus alternatives to expression x. This set will contain the focused element itself as well as its alternatives. The assumption that we have a typical set of alternatives ALTagain={[[again]], [[still]], ∅} explains discourse coherence in the exchanges below. Here I use contrast to test whether something is an FAlt to again or still. A category a stands in a contrast relation to a category b if the the ordinary semantic value of b is a member of the focus semantic value of a, i.e. [[b]]o Œ [[a]]f, and [[b]]o ≠[[a]]o (Rooth (1992a)). Regarding (4A-4Bb), for example, a natural analysis in the framework of Rooth (1992a) would be to regard (4A) as the focus antecedent for (4Bb), as indicated in (6). This implies (6c), which in turn implies that an FAlt to again is the empty adverb. (3) [[again]] (p<t,<s,t>>) (t) (w) = 1 if p(t)(w) & $t'[t'<t & p(t')(w)] = 0 if ~p(t)(w) & $t'[t'<t & p(t')(w)] undefined otherwise. (4) A: Ellen is the president. B: a. (Yes,).