Uli Sauerland

Stephanie Solt

The Sinn und Bedeutung conferences are one of the leading international venues for research in formal semantics. The conference "Sinn und Bedeutung 22" took place in Potsdam and Berlin in September 2019. Volume 1 contains 29 papers that were presented at the conference. Table of contents: Márta Abrusán, Nicholas Asher and Tim Van de Cruys, "Content vs. function words: The view from distributional semantics," p. 1-21 Dorothy Ahn, "Korean classifier-less number constructions," p. 23-38 Sascha Alexeyenko, "Quantification in event semantics: Generalized quantifiers vs. sub-events," p. 39-53 Pranav Anand and Natasha Korotkova, "Acquaintance content and obviation," p. 55-72 Pranav Anand and Maziar Toosarvandani, "No explanation for the historical present: Temporal sequencing and discourse," p. 73-90 Curt Anderson and Sebastian Löbner, "Roles and the compositional semantics of role-denoting relational adjectives," p. 91-108 Muriel Assmann, Daniel Büring, Izabela Jordanoska and Max Prüller, "Focus constraints on ellipsis --- An unalternatives account," p. 109-126 Corien Bary, Daniel Altshuler, Kristen Syrett and Peter De Swart, "Factors licensing embedded present tense in speech reports," p. 127-142 Itai Bassi and Ezer Rasin, "Equational-intensional relative clauses with syntactic representation," p. 143-159 Andrea Beltrama, "Subjective assertions are weak: Exploring the illocutionary profile of perspective-dependent predicates," p. 160-173 Andrea Beltrama, Erlinde Meertens and Maribel Romero, "Decomposing cornering effects: an experimental study," p. 175-190 Anton Benz, Carla Bombi and Nicole Gotzner, "Scalar diversity and negative strengthening," p. 191-203 Anton Benz, Nicole Gotzner and Lisa Raithel, "Embedded implicature in a new interactive paradigm," p. 205-221 M. Ryan Bochnak and Martina Martinovic, "Modal height and modal flavor: The case of Wolof di," p. 223-240 David Boylan, "Miners and modals," p. 241-258 Saskia Brockmann, Sara McConnell, Valentine Hacquard and Jeffrey Lidz, "Children's comprehension of pronouns and definites," p. 259-276 Sebastian Bücking, "Painting cows from a type-logical perspective," p. 277-294 Nattanun Chanchaochai, "On acquiring a complex personal reference system: Experimental results from Thai children with autism," p. 295-312 WooJin Chung, "Context updates in head-final languages: Linear order or hierarchy?," p. 313-329 Ava Creemers, Jérémy Zehr and Florian Schwarz, "Interpreting presuppositions in the scope of quantifiers: Every vs. at least one," p. 331-348 Virginia Dawson, "A new kind of epistemic indefinite," p. 349-366 Michael Deigan, "Counterfactual donkeys don't get high," p. 367-384 Maria Esipova, "Focus on what's not at issue: Gestures, presuppositions, appositives under contrastive focus," p. 385-402 Danny Fox, "Partition by exhaustification: Comments on Dayal 1996," p. 403-434 Yosef Grodzinsky, Galit Agmon, Kedem Snir, Isabelle Deschamps and Yonatan Loewenstein, "The processing cost of Downward Entailingness: the representation and verification of comparative constructions," p. 435-451 Andreas Haida, Luka Crnic and Yosef Grodzinsky, "Linguistic barriers to logical reasoning: a new perspective on Aristotelian syllogisms," p. 453-468 Stefan Hinterwimmer and Cornelia Ebert, "A comparison of fei and aber," p. 469-486 Sunwoo Jeong, "QUD effects on epistemic containment principle: An experimental study," p. 487-504 Elsi Kaiser, Justin Nichols and Catherine Wang, "Experimenting with imposters: What modulates choice of person agreement in pronouns?," p. 505-521

Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 22

Hans-Martin Gärtner

Human language is a phenomenon of immense richness: It provides finely nuanced means of expression that underlie the formation of culture and society; it is subject to subtle, unexpected constraints like syntactic islands and cross-over phenomena; different mutually-unintelligeable individual languages are numerous; and the descriptions of individual languages occupy thousands of pages. Recent work in linguistics, however, has tried to argue that despite all appearances to the contrary, the human biological capacity for language may be reducible to a small inventory of core cognitive competencies. The most radical version of this view has emerged from the Minimalist Program: The claim that language consists of only the ability to generate recursive structures by a computational mechanism. On this view, all other properties of language must result from the interaction at the interfaces of that mechanism and other mental systems not exclusively devoted to language. Since language could then be described as the simplest recursive system satisfying the requirements of the interfaces, one can speak of the Minimalist Equation: Interfaces + Recursion = Language. The question whether all the richness of language can be reduced to that minimalist equation has already inspired several fruitful lines of research that led to important new results. While a full assessment of the minimalist equation will require evidence from many different areas of inquiry, this volume focuses especially on the perspective of syntax and semantics. Within the minimalist architecture, this places our concern with the core computational mechanism and the (LF-)interface where recursive structures are fed to interpretation. Specific questions that the papers address are: What kind of recursive structures can the core generator form? How can we determine what the simplest recursive system is? How can properties of language that used to be ascribed to the recursive generator be reduced to interface properties? What effects do syntactic operations have on semantic interpretation? To what extent do models of semantic interpretation support the LF-interface conditions postulated by minimalist syntax?

Uli Sauerland

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