The Circle is a weekly forum dedicated to discussion of the descriptive, experimental, and theoretical study of syntax and semantics, featuring presentations of ongoing research by members of the Berkeley Linguistics Department and other departments, as well as discussion of previously published works.
Fridays, 3:00-4:30 pm
1303 Dwinelle Hall
spring 2011
fall 2010
spring 2010
fall 2009
spring 2009
fall 2008
spring 2008
fall 2007
spring 2007
fall 2006
spring 2006
fall 2005
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Linguistics
PAST MEETINGS:
9 december
LSA practice talks:
Oana David (UC Berkeley) 'Historical perspectives on the semantic co-development of clitic doubling and differential object marking in Romanian'
Russell Lee-Goldman (UC Berkeley) 'Constructions can encode context - the case of copular clauses'
2 december
Lev Michael (UC Berkeley) 'Directionals in Matsigenka: A neo-Reichenbachian approach'
25 november
University holiday. No meeting this week.
18 november
Michael Houser (UC Berkeley)
11 november
University holiday. No meeting this week.
4 november
Roslyn Burns (UC Berkeley) 'Bantu, optional Anti Agreement Effects'
28 october
Judith Fiedler (UC Santa Cruz) 'Clefts in Germanic'
21 october
Sven Lauer (Stanford) 'You can't always want what you want: Understanding Anankastic Conditionals' (based on joint work with Cleo Condoravdi). Abstract:
Anankastic conditionals, such as If you want to go to Harlem, you have to/should take the A-train, pose a number of problems for classical theories of the semantics of conditionals and modals. Recent accounts (Saebo 2001, von Fintel and Iatridou 2005, von Stechow, Krasikova and Penka 2006) have attempted to capture the semantics of these conditionals by proposing a non-standard analysis of the modal in the consequent, with varying, but ultimately unsatisfying, success. We instead take the "desire predicate" to be the source of the particular semantic effects of anankastic conditionals. Beginning with the realization that, in anankastic conditionals, "want" is interpreted more like "intend" or "plan" than like "desire", we propose that "want" is underspecified with respect to the preference it targets. In particular, it can target the "effective preferences" of an agent in the sense of Condoravdi and Lauer (2011), accounting for the puzzling behavior of anankastic conditionals. We also show that this reading of "want" is present in non-anankastic conditionals, which provide interesting "hybrid" cases, which have some, but not all properties of anankastic conditionals. An example of these is If you want to get a driver's license, you have to be at least 16 years old.
14 october
Luke Maurits (The University of Adelaide) 'Basic word
order, past and present: connections to mental representation and
information theory'
7 october
Malgorzata Szajbel-Keck (UC Berkeley, Slavic) `Highly non-canonical adjectives in Polish (and other Slavic languages): classification issues'
30 september
Cancelled
23 september
Eve Sweetser (UC Berkeley) 'Conditionals, viewpoint and embedding'
16 september
Florian Lionnet (UC Berkeley) 'The origin and development of relative and demonstrative constructions in Juu (Northern Khoisan) languages'
9 september
Peter Jenks (UC Berkeley) 'The classifier-modifier construction: evidence for a silent determiner in Thai'
2 september
Ethan Nowak (UC Berkeley, philosophy) 'There's nothing ambiguous about 'that' (the semantics of complex determiners)'
26 august
Line Mikkelsen (UC Berkeley) 'Orphans hosted by VP anaphora'