meaning sciences club

We are a discussion group at Berkeley focused on semantics and related issues in pragmatics, logic, cognitive science, formal epistemology and the philosophy of language. Seth Yalcin handles most of of the logistics.
 

upcoming talks

October 20, 2022
Judith Degen (Stanford)
On the role of gradient referential utility and incrementality in cross-linguistic referring expression production

Reference is one of the most basic and prevalent functions of language use. A long-standing puzzle for theories of language production is that speakers routinely include redundant modifiers -- i.e., modifiers that aren't strictly speaking necessary for the purpose of uniquely establishing reference -- in referring expressions. This redundancy has been argued to violate the tenets of rational language use, thus posing a challenge for standard pragmatic and psycholinguistic theories that treat language production as an efficient tradeoff between maximizing utterance informativeness and minimizing utterance cost.

I show that maintaining the standard theory (as formalized within the Rational Speech Act framework), but relaxing the semantics of words from Boolean to continuous values, yields a number of well-documented patterns in English whereby redundancy is modulated by linguistic (e.g., adjective type) and extra-linguistic (e.g., visual scene complexity) contextual factors. However, this model does not capture a key result: that redundancy appears to be less likely in languages with post-nominal modifiers, like Spanish. I describe the cross-linguistic predictions of an incrementalized version of the model and present data from production studies on a small but diverse set of languages that calls into question the relative importance of language-specific incremental pressures over the inherent contextual utility of mentioning certain properties. This work highlights the need for more explicit formalizations of notions of efficiency in language production; and for further cross-linguistic investigations of reference.

234 Moses Hall, 4-5:30pm

 

 

previous talks

September 1, 2022
Simon Goldstein (ACU)
KK is Wrong Because We Say So
(Joint work with John Hawthorne)
234 Moses Hall, 4-5:30pm

Thursday, November 14, 2019
Virginia Dawson (Berkeley)
Disjunction is not Boolean: novel evidence from Tiwa
234 Moses Hall, 12:30-2pm

Thursday, September 19, 2019
Cleo Condoravdi (Stanford, CSLI)
Ad-nominal Epistemic Adverbs Without Hidden Structure
234 Moses Hall, 12:30-2pm

Wednesday, May 15, 2019:
Polly Jacobson (Brown)
Direct Compositionality and Variable Free Semantics: The Case of 'MaxElide'
1229 Dwinelle Hall, 3-4:30pm

Friday, April 13, 2018:
Amy Rose Deal (Berkeley) 
Compositional Paths to De Re
1303 Dwinelle Hall, 3-4:30pm

Friday, April 20, 2017:
Ethan Jerzak (Berkeley)
Two Ways to Want
1303 Dwinelle Hall, 3-4:30pm

Thursday, August 24, 2017:
Daniel Rothschild (University College London)
Probabilistic Context Updates
234 Moses Hall, 12:00pm-1:30pm

Friday, April 14, 2017:
Cian Dorr (NYU)
Conditionals, Closeness, and Probability
234 Moses Hall, 12:30pm-2pm

Saturday, May 6, 2017:
Barbara Partee (University of Massachusetts at Amherst)
The Intertwining Influences of Logic, Philosophy, and Linguistics in the Development of Formal Semantics and Pragmatics
105 Northgate Hall, 11am-12:20pm

 

November 3, 2016
David Plunkett (Dartmouth)
Clinic: Metalinguistic Negotiation
234 Moses Hall, 4:30pm-6pm

Weekend March 12-13, 2016: 
Meaning Sciences Workshop 2


March 11, 2016: 
William Starr (Cornell)
Force and Conversational States
234 Moses Hall, 5pm

December 22, 2015: 
Ezra Keshet (Michigan)
Imperatives Under and Over Conjunction 
234 Moses Hall, 2:30pm-4pm

November 19, 2015: 
Jessica Rett (UCLA)
Attitude Markers and Sincerity Conditions in an Update Semantics 
3401 Dwinelle Hall, 4pm-5:30PM

April 24, 2015: 
Zoltan Gendler Szabo (Yale)
Semantic Explanations
234 Moses Hall, 4pm-5:30PM

 

Dec 2, 2014: 
Richard Lawrence (Berkeley)
Three Analyses of Specificational Sentences
234 Moses Hall, 2:30pm - 4pm

Oct 14, 2014:
Yael Sharvit (UCLA) 
Sequence of Tense: Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics
234 Moses Hall, 2:30pm - 4pm

 

Sept 30, 2104:
Melissa Fusco (Berkeley)
Deontic Disjunction
234 Moses Hall, 2:30pm - 4pm

 

Apr 28, 2014:
Daniel Rothschild (UCL) 
Epistemic Contradictions
1229 Dwinelle Hall, 12:30-2pm

 

Mar 8-9, 2014:
Conference: Metasemantics (joint with CSMN) 
Howison Library, Moses Hall

 

Feb 24, 2014: 
Ryan Bochnak (Berkeley) 
Degree achievements in a degree-less language
3401 Dwinelle Hall, 12:30-2pm

 

Dec 3, 2013:
Cleo Condoravdi (Stanford)
The Ingredients of Anankasticity
234 Moses Hall, 12:30pm - 2pm

Nov 5, 2013: 
Donka Farkas (Santa Cruz)
Assertions, Polar Questions, and the Land In Between
234 Moses Hall, 12:30pm - 2pm

Oct 1, 2013:
Chris Potts (Stanford) 
Conversational implicature: interacting with grammar
234 Moses Hall, 12:30pm - 2pm

 

April 8, 2013: 
Seth Yalcin (Berkeley)
Epistemic Modality De Re
234 Moses Hall, 12:30pm - 2pm

March 18, 2013: 
Ethan Nowak (Berkeley)
Non-Deictic Complex Demonstratives
234 Moses Hall, 12:30pm - 2pm

 

Feb 25, 2013: 
Peter Jenks (Berkeley) 
Clinic: Quantifier Raising
234 Moses Hall, 12:30pm - 2pm

 

Feb 11, 2013: 
Herman Cappelen (St. Andrews)
The Philosophical (in)Significance of Indexicality and the First Person
234 Moses Hall, 12:30pm - 2pm

 

Nov 13, 2012:
Thomas Icard (Stanford) 
Wesley Holliday (Berkeley)
Logic, Probability, and Epistemic Modality
234 Moses Hall, 12:30pm - 2pm

 

Oct 16, 2012: 
Line Mikkelsen (Berkeley)
Some Observations about Sameness, Identity and Comparison
234 Moses Hall, 12:30pm - 2pm

 

Sept 11, 2012:
Michael Rieppel (Berkeley)
Shifty Definites
234 Moses Hall, 12:30pm - 2pm