principle A violation

overheard last night:
(while talking about some self-absorbed older lech)

He’s not unattractive. I can see why you’d think he was cute. I mean, I mean, why he would think himself cute.

EDIT: seconds after posting, i realized that this isn’t a principle A violation at all because “think he cute” wouldn’t work at all here. “think” here isn’t the same “think” that takes a full CP, so there would be no principle A violation.

also, unrelatedly, here’s a strange adnominal ER usage, brought up in yesterday’s topics seminar:

Q: who’s in John’s apt?
A1: *He.
A2: Him.
A3: ?He himself.

(yes, I know that in A1 “he is” would be fine. the puzzle is why the adnominal ER should make A1 acceptable, if it is at all)

ok, bsg

So, Battlestar Galactica’s last run premiers this Friday. And, to be quite honest, I’m happy that it’s almost over because I can’t stand to follow such a disappointing show anymore. I was hoping to avoid having to watch altogether by reading spoilers, but there don’t seem to be very good ones online yet. But while reading through speculations on who the final Cylon could be, it struck me that people are perhaps mistaking Gricean violations for straight up lying.

(sort of spoilers ahead, but none of the upcoming season):

io9 has this list of possible final Cylons, but it’s all based on this observation:

Secondly, D’Anna Biers (Lucy Lawless) implied the final Cylon is not in the fleet, at the start of the most recent episode, “Revelations.” It seems unlikely that she’s lying. Actually, here’s what she says:

Leoben: We’ll rejoin your fleet within an hour.
Roslin: Then we will return the final five to you.
Biers: Four. There are four in your fleet.
Roslin: Four? Where’s the fifth?
Biers: I want the four in your fleet.

But D’Anna Biers wouldn’t be lying–she’d simply be failing to be as informative as possible! (see here for more on Gricean maxims) And we have evidence to suggest that Biers is linguistically savvy — at another point in the episode, when Roslin asks her about the final five, Biers responds “What, you didn’t know you were one of them?” (See projection of presuppositions here) Add in the fact that series writer Jane Espenson did her Ph.D. in linguistics at Berkeley (working with George Lakoff himself) and I think suddenly it’s not that implausible to suggest that maybe all five of the final Cylons *were* in the fleet.

Of course, there’s one more thing we have to consider. D’Anna’s demand that she wants “the four in your fleet”. The use of the definite article seems to presuppose that there are a distinct four–if there were five in the fleet, which four would be *the* four that she referred to?

And with that, this is hopefully the last I will ever blog about BSG ever again.

VI. Huh?

Below is an excerpt from what I’ve been working on this morning. Perhaps while I’m at lunch, someone will come up with a solution for me.

(A bit of background on adnominal ERs – there are two main approaches to the semantic analysis of adnominal ERs: it is a focus sensitive operator like “even” or “only”(Gast & Siemund), or it is itself the focussed item (Eckardt), with other mechanisms (perhaps something like Krifka’s Emph.Assert) giving you certain ‘flavors’ of the ER (surprise, non-surprise readings). Below, what I’m concerned with is what appears to be a non-surprise instance of the adnominal ER, though I haven’t quite convinced myself that there’s nothing surprising about (1).)

Consider a context in which it is understood that Bill Cosby is a comedic genius.

(1) That joke is so hard to deliver that only Bill Cosby himself can do it/that Bill Cosby himself has to do it.
(2) That joke is so hard to deliver that even Bill Cosby himself can’t do it.

(2) shouldn’t surprise us as it is another case of the surprise interpretation of the adnominal ER. (1), however, is not quite so straightforward. We’ve already set up the context that Bill Cosby is a comedic genius, one of the most capable comedians alive today. We’ve set up a scale of comedic ability, putting Bill Cosby towards the high end of the scale. But then we shouldn’t be surprised that Bill Cosby is delivering the joke, if others at the lower end of the scale can’t.

Note also that the adnominal ER is infelicitous without the “only” in (1):

(3) #That joke is so hard to deliver that Bill Cosby himself can do it.

But the negation is fine (contrast with (2)):

(4) That joke is so hard to deliver that Bill Cosby himself can’t do it.

Again, (4) shouldn’t surprise us, since this is again the standard surprise use of the ER. Further, (3) shouldn’t surprise us either, really, since there’s a presupposition clash. But then why should “that Bill Cosby himself has to do it” be acceptable? And why should the insertion of “only” make (3) better?

(ht jasper for the original example in (1))

it’s been too long

since i’ve geached or zed

indirect comparisons

Last night at dinner, Raber said this about Hillary Clinton:

I think she’s more woman than Bill is man.

An indirect comparison differs from a direct comparison in that a direct comparison compares two things along a mutual scale (“Hillary is taller than Bill”) while an indirect comparison compares two properties which do not share a scale of measurement, like the example above, but more transparently as in the utterance “Raj is smarter than he is hard-working” (sorry, Raj).

See Alan Bale’s recent L&P paper A universal scale of comparison in which he provides a unified theory for both direct and indirect comparison.

A related side-note on contextually determined restrictions:
Can comparatives fix different domain restrictions for two different individuals? That is with (1), could you ever say that this is true on a reading where Jasper is tall for a basketball player and Raj is tall for an engineer and Raj’s tall-for-an-engineer-ness is greater than Jasper’s tall-for-a-basketball-ness, even when Raj is, say, 5’8″ and Jasper is 6’8″?

(1) Raj is taller than Jasper.

The complication with (1) seems to be that there seem to be two “tall”s–tall₁ for the contextually dependent “tall-for-a-x” and tall₂ for something like “Emma is 65 inches tall”. The comparative “taller” seems most often used as comparing tall₂. To get the interpretation of (1) that I mention above, you’d need to be comparing tall₁ with the domain restriction differing for each individual. (In a semantic theory of domain restrictions as in Stanley & Szabó (2000) or Cunningham (2007), whatever your semantics for the comparative itself, you can just leave the argument slot/variable in “for-a-x” free.)

This complication can be easily ignored by just using another predicate that doesn’t have a ₂-y interpretation, like red. So, for example, you can’t say “The firetruck is 637 nm red.” This has nothing to do with red not being a measurable predicate either. (I forget who exactly discusses this, but there is a similar observation about “short”–*”Raj is 3 feet short”.) I actually think (2) is fine, but maybe only on a hyperbolic reading?):

(2) Kate’s hair is redder than a lobster.

I don’t know that I’m making a point here.

‘Hamilton, he ain’t no president’

In episode 1 of the Wire, the boys discuss American history and exceptive constructions. Video after the
Read the rest of this entry »

Exceptive constructions in 1772

John Adams, in a letter to Abigail Adams, wrote:

I wish myself at Braintree. This wandering, itinerating Life grows more and more disagreable to me. I want to see my Wife and Children every Day, I want to see my Grass and Blossoms and Corn, &c. every Day. I want to see my Workmen, nay I almost want to go and see the Bosse Calfs’s almost as often as Charles does. But above all except the Wife and Children I want to see my Books.

I’ve been collecting a bunch of them recently, actually. I’ll post more soon.

FAIL

Wikipedia demonstrates presupposition failure:

Don’t trip

Pretty solid donkey anaphora in the chorus of the Trina song following the Read the rest of this entry »

A little something for everyone

I intend the interpretation where the universal quantifier has wide scope.

1. For the Curb Your Enthusiasm fans:
Last weekend I fell down a flight of stairs. (Well, I didn’t fall down the entire flight. I fell, landed on my back, then slid the rest of the way down. Note to self: don’t hurry in socks down carpeted steps, ever.) I spent most of the weekend chilling out and went to Health Services on Monday where I was told that no structural damage was done, but I had strained some pretty bad muscle tension. I was then prescribed a painkiller and a muscle relaxant. The muscle relaxant was cyclobenzaprine. Which is exactly what Larry David is handed in the seventh episode of the last season of Curb Your Enthusiasm:

(h/t Ben for pointing this out to me and also lifting everything over half a pound for me.)

2. Quantification over times and individuals
I love Garfield minus Garfield. Pretty much every strip makes me laugh out loud. For several minutes. And a recent gmg has an example of quantification over times and individuals and how you don’t seem to get inverse scope:

3. There was something else, I swear. But I forgot.