BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:[Online talk] - Iconic Plurals - Prof Philippe Schlenker (Institut
  Jean-Nicod\, CNRS / New York University)
DTSTART:20200618T153000Z
DTEND:20200618T170000Z
UID:TALK142387@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Julia Heine
DESCRIPTION:In several sign languages\, in some homesigns\, and in some sp
 eech-replacing gestures\, plurals can be marked by repetitions\, with a di
 stinction between punctuated and unpunctuated repetitions\, which respecti
 vely come with precise and vague quantitative conditions  (Pfau and Steinb
 ach 2006\, Coppola et al. 2013\, Abner et al. 2015).  Schlenker and Lamber
 ton 2019 show that ASL plurals can have an irreducibly iconic component\, 
 e.g. an unpunctuated repetition of TROPHY arranged as a triangle may serve
  to refer to trophies with a triangular arrangement\; but they took as pri
 mitive that repetitions serve to express plurals. \n\nHere we provide an i
 conic semantics for the repetitions themselves\, using the formal semantic
 s for pictorial representations developed in Greenberg 2013. Simplifying s
 omewhat: punctuated repetitions correspond to precise\, 'exactly' quantita
 tive conditions because they are easy to count\; unpunctuated repetitions 
 correspond to imprecise\, 'at least' quantitative conditions because they 
 are  presented as hard to count and are blurry (vague) representations. Ou
 r analysis has three main modules: (i) a formal semantics for pictorial re
 presentations\, (ii) a vagueness component (a simplified version of 'toler
 ant' approaches)\, and (iii) a mechanism of pragmatic exploitation (within
  a simplified RSA model)\, which is essential to obtain 'at least' reading
 s for unpunctuated repetitions.
LOCATION:Online
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR