Past Event! Note: this event has already taken place.

Dr. Lyn Frazier: (University of Massachusetts-Amherst)

March 13, 2015 at 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM

Location:2017 Dunton Tower
Cost:Free
Audience:null

Speaker: Dr. Lyn Frazier, UMass Amherst (http://people.umass.edu/lyn/)

When: Friday March 13, 2:30pm-4:00pm

Where: DT2017 (the meeting room on the 20th floor of Dunton Tower)

Title: An act apart: Processing Not-At-Issue Content

Abstract:

Potts (2005) investigated parentheticals, appositives, expressives (e.g., damn) and honorifics and argued that they form a semantic natural class in that these “Not at Issue” (NAI) expressions do not contribute to the truth-conditions of the embedding utterance, they convey speaker commitments, and their semantic interpretation does not interact with At Issue (AI) content. To explain these properties, he offered a multi-dimensional semantics. See Schlenker (2010) for an alternative semantic account without multi-dimensionality and, for pragmatic accounts, see Harris and Potts (2009) and Amaral et al. (2007).

Based on research conducted with Brian Dillon and Chuck Clifton, I will argue that NAI expressions are complete but dependent speech acts, and presumably as a result, they may be represented in a separate memory store from AI content. Evidence derives from differential effects of lengthening AI vs NAI content. The effect of added length or complexity is systematically greater for AI content (restrictive relatives) compared to NAI content (appositive relatives). Additional evidence comes from distinct interpretations for comparable material when it is expressed as AI vs NAI content, and evidence that expressives exhibit a similar interpretation (the same range of interpretations and sensitivity to the same interpretive principles) when the expressive stands as an utterance by itself, where it must be analyzed as a speech act, and when it appears as an attributive adjective (Frazier et al., 2014). Online evidence shows an interaction of a wh-dependency in the embedding sentence with the status (AI vs. NAI) of an embedded structure containing a wh-dependency (Dillon et al., in progress), as expected if content in the same memory store may interact, but content in different stores may not.