Aron giving a talk at 8th Virtual NYI

On constraining alternatives.

Monday January 15, Aron Hirsch presents his joint work with Bernhard Schwarz on "Constraining Alternatives" in the Distinguished Linguist Lecture Series hosted by the NYI Global Institute of Cognitive, Cultural and Linguistics Studies. The abstract is below.

The focus operator only conveys that alternatives to its prejacent are false (e.g. “I only had coffee” entails that “I ate” is false).  But, how are the alternatives computed?  It has been observed that alternatives often cannot contain negation. Fox & Katzir (2011) propose that alternatives are constructed by replacing the focus with syntactic constituents of equal or lesser structural complexity.  If negation is not present in the prejacent, it cannot occur in the alternatives either, since it would add complexity.  In this talk, however, we observe that more complex alternatives are available in certain discourse contexts.  This will lead us to explore a view where more complex alternatives are not blocked by the grammar, and alternatives are regulated pragmatically by the Question Under Discussion (as in Beaver & Clark 2011, Roberts 2012, Katzir 2023).  This is joint work with Bernhard Schwarz.