时间：11月3日下午15:10-18:00

地点：文史楼215

The Truth-conditional Semantics of Evaluative Adverbs
Mingya Liu
liu.mingya@googlemail.com

Abstract: In this talk, I discuss the truth-conditional semantics of evaluative adverbs (EADVs) such as kexi ‘regrettably’, buxing ‘unfortunately’ in Chinese. Potts (2005) assumes that sentences with EADVs express two propositions and provides a formal analysis for them in his two-dimensional type-logical system of conventional implicatures (CIs), as shown in (1).
(1) 莫扎特可惜英年早逝。
‘Mozart, regrettably, died at a young age.’
a. At-issue content: Mozart died at a young age.
b. CI: It is regrettable that Mozart died at a young age.
Despite its manifest merits, Potts’ CI analysis fails to address the (semantic or pragmatic) interdependence between the at-issue and the CI content of e.g. (1). In fact, in his system, the at-issue content and the CI content of a sentence are always independent of each other in terms of truth values. However, as (1) shows, the truth value of the CI content (1-b) is dependent on that of the at-issue content in (1-a). Conceptually, this is similar to the truth value gaps due to presupposition failure, however, the embedding test in (2) shows that the CI content of an EADV in a sentence is not presupposed but at-issue, as it does not project when embedded in the antecedent of a conditional.
(2) 如果他不幸英年早逝了，他的家人就没依靠了。
‘If he, unfortunately, died at a young age, his family would be out of support.’
=/=> He died at a young age.
Based on these properties, I propose that factive EADVs such as  kexi ‘regrettably’ do not just trigger CI contents but also CP (conventional presupposition) contents. Such EADVs cannot be embedded in entailment cancelling contexts (e.g. negation, modals, questions, conditionals), as in those contexts, their presupposition would not be satisfied. Nonfactive EADVs, for example, buxing ‘unfortunately’, differ from factive EADVs in their embeddability in entailment-cancelling contexts. For them, I propose a different - non-presuppositional - lexical meaning.
In order to derive the right truth conditions of sentences with EADVs, I develop a lambda calcus LCP/CI by revising Potts’ two-dimensional logic LCI into a three-dimensional one with both CP and CI dimensions.  This formal language is intended to be applicable for CP/CI meanings in general.

References (selected): Liu, Mingya. Submitted. The Truth-conditional Semantics of Evaluative Adverbs. PhD thesis. University of Goettingen, Germany.

报告人：刘明亚， 德国哥廷根大学英语系语言学分支，研究员（researcher）