Mayfest 2009: Moving Beyond Truth Conditions

Every year the graduate students of the Linguistics Department of the University of Maryland organize a linguistics workshop focusing on a different aspect of language. The goal of this year's Mayfest is to bring together researchers from various disciplines to discuss the ways in which cross-disciplinary research can move the study of semantics beyond truth conditions.

Talks at this year's workshop will center around the mental representation of meaning. In particular, we are interested in fostering discussion on what kinds of mental computations are involved in representing sentence meanings, how real-time understanding can provide insight into these computations, and the relation between linguistic meaning and extralinguistic concepts. In addressing these issues, we hope that the talks at this year's Mayfest can illustrate that experimental methodology provides more than simple arbitration between competing theories of meaning.

Speakers

• Emmanuel Chemla
• Dan Grodner: Some Reasons to Doubt that 'Some' (and Probably All) Scalar Inferences are Delayed
• Matt Husband: The Computation of Telicity
• Ira Noveck: Pragmatic Enrichment
• Daniel Rothschild: Explaining Presupposition Projection
• Philippe Schlenker: From Implicatures to Presuppositions: New Debates on the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface
• Julien Musolino: The Linguistic Representation of Number: Integrating Formal and Developmental Perspectives
• Anna Papafragou: Space in Language and Thought
• Paul Pietroski & Jeff Lidz: The Verificational Thickness of Meaning: Number,Semantics and Psychology
• Liina Pylkkänen: The Anterior Midline Field: Progress Report