sorry for the hiatus

“Things don’t feel like they’re moving fast, but a couple years ago doesn’t feel like it happened a couple years ago.”

monsters coming soon.

major major paper

i’ll be defending my major paper tomorrow (wed sept 30th) in the cog&lingsci dept from 4-5 in metcalf 129. i’ll be talking about adnominal emphatic reflexives (which i seem to have been talking about for, oh, about my whole life now). it should be pretty exciting, and i’m excited to catch up with barry schein again! if you’re in town and syntax/semantics/pragmatics is yr thing, i’d love for you come. if it’s not yr thing, you can still come help me celebrate later.

[abstract for talk]

may or may not

so a few posts ago, there was a discussion of the semantics/pragmatics of “whether or not” constructions. to sum up: “whether p” constructions (and yes/no questions) demonstrate strong exhausitivity–the idea that knowing the answer to the question is to know the true complete answer (as opposed to just a true answer). lance does a nice job of expositing this in the comment to the “whether” post, so go check that out. so the question is: if to know “whether p” is the same as to know “whether not p”, why do people ever say “whether or not p” (e.g. “john knows whether or not sara likes funk music”)

anyway, tangentially, it occurred to me that there’s a similar puzzle with the disjunction of “may”. the following example comes from an online personality quiz:

“This may or may not describe you: An ‘individual’, i.e. a person who does not conform to society’s beliefs that all people should follow trends and do what their peers do.”

perfect summer mix

Throw down yr <3

First in line to the bela fleck documentary at the cable car. We got here embarrassingly early.

for once in my life/i want you back

True north

Haaaaaay

whether (or not)

if embedded “whether” questions are always strongly exhaustive, is it redundant to say “whether or not S” ? as in:
“In licensing the adnominal ER, all that matters is whether or not the referent may be identified as the end of some scale of alternative individuals.”

some interesting musings from the prescriptivists appear when you google “whether or not”, followed by actual usages.

extraposing emphatic reflexives

cohen (1999) notes that the meaning of the emphatic reflexive can’t just depend on syntactic distribution. that is, while previous researchers (like edmondson and plank (1978)) had tried to nail down the difference between the adverbal and the adnominal emphatic reflexive as an issue due to their syntactic placement (and hence semantic combinatorics), cohen dismisses this, showing that things just aren’t that simple. for example, we know that the adnominal emphatic reflexive tends to impart some feeling of remarkability or surprise, while the adverbal emphatic reflexive contributes a presupposition that the subject of the sentence was the sole agent of the event described.

(1) although john was sick all week, he himself came out barhopping last night.
(2) john drank that whole bottle of whiskey himself.

cohen noticed, however, that you can get the remarkability reading even in adverbal positions
(3) the king himself invited me to the party
(4) the king invited me to the party himself

(4) is ambiguous between the remarkability reading and the sole agent reading because it is possible for the event of inviting to involve multiple agents. if we have a verb that denotes an event that cannot involve multiple agents, however, we get an unambiguous interpretation of the emphatic reflexive as carrying the remarkability presupposition.

(5) the great thing about firebreathing is that the flame gives off so much heat. if you’re watching someone breathe fire, you can feel the heat, but when you’re firebreathing yourself, the surge of heat is intense.

more on this to come..

also, i’m really diggin’ the new nathan fake album. holla.

mantis sac #1