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Colloquium fest: QP2 presentation by Willy Cheung: Towards an Account of Cataphora in Monadic Dynamic Semantics

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April 16, 2021
3:55PM - 5:15PM
Virtual zoom meeting

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Add to Calendar 2021-04-16 15:55:00 2021-04-16 17:15:00 Colloquium fest: QP2 presentation by Willy Cheung: Towards an Account of Cataphora in Monadic Dynamic Semantics Abstract: In this work, I investigate ways to account for cataphora within the monadic dynamic semantics grammar formalism, in order to allow acceptable cases of cataphora while blocking unacceptable cases. Cataphora refers to the phenomenon of a pronoun appearing before its antecedent, contrary to the more typical case where a pronoun follows its antecedent. Monadic dynamic semantics (Charlow 2014) is one particular implementation of dynamic semantics within the categorial grammar tradition that makes use of the mathematical theory of monads. I first consider two previous theories, and their predictions on a set of linguistic data: 1) monadic dynamic semantics as-is, and 2) a reconstructed linear order constraint proposed by Barker and Shan 2014. I show that 1) overgenerates and does not rule out an unacceptable case of cataphora, while 2) undergenerates and blocks an acceptable case of cataphora. Having shown the issues, I describe my preliminary proposal: a constraint which makes a distinction between coordination and subordination, and only blocks cataphora across coordination. This makes the correct predictions on the data of interest. I end by mentioning some remaining problems (improvements on generalized coordination, handling within-clause restrictions on cataphora) and other future directions (exploring to what degree cataphora constraints are syntactic, organizing and accounting for a more comprehensive set of cataphora data). Accommodation statement: If you require an accommodation such as live captioning or interpretation to participate in this event, please contact Ashwini Deo at deo.13@osu.edu. In general, requests made two weeks before the event will allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet requests made after this date.  Virtual zoom meeting Department of Linguistics linguistics@osu.edu America/New_York public

Abstract: In this work, I investigate ways to account for cataphora within the monadic dynamic semantics grammar formalism, in order to allow acceptable cases of cataphora while blocking unacceptable cases. Cataphora refers to the phenomenon of a pronoun appearing before its antecedent, contrary to the more typical case where a pronoun follows its antecedent. Monadic dynamic semantics (Charlow 2014) is one particular implementation of dynamic semantics within the categorial grammar tradition that makes use of the mathematical theory of monads.

I first consider two previous theories, and their predictions on a set of linguistic data: 1) monadic dynamic semantics as-is, and 2) a reconstructed linear order constraint proposed by Barker and Shan 2014. I show that 1) overgenerates and does not rule out an unacceptable case of cataphora, while 2) undergenerates and blocks an acceptable case of cataphora. Having shown the issues, I describe my preliminary proposal: a constraint which makes a distinction between coordination and subordination, and only blocks cataphora across coordination. This makes the correct predictions on the data of interest. I end by mentioning some remaining problems (improvements on generalized coordination, handling within-clause restrictions on cataphora) and other future directions (exploring to what degree cataphora constraints are syntactic, organizing and accounting for a more comprehensive set of cataphora data).

Accommodation statement: If you require an accommodation such as live captioning or interpretation to participate in this event, please contact Ashwini Deo at deo.13@osu.edu. In general, requests made two weeks before the event will allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet requests made after this date. 

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