Semantics Research Group (Tokyo/Hybrid) 2026/5/15

[jrta...@gmail.com]

意味論研究会のお知らせ

意味論研究会の会合をお知らせします。対面の場所・ズームのアクセス情報は下記の通りです。どなたでも参加できますので，多くの方の参加をお待ちしています。また、会合終了後に食事会を予定しております。ご参加希望の方はご指名と所属をご記入の上、その旨を4月24日（金）までにChris Tancrediにご連絡くださいますようお願い致します。(Chris Tancredi, cdtan...@gmail.com )

The Semantics Research Group will be having a talk as detailed below. There will also be a dinner after the talk. If you would like to participate in the dinner, please RSVP with Chris Tancredi by Friday, April 24th. Make sure to include your name and affiliation. (Chris Tancredi,  cdtan...@gmail.com )

Date: May 15 (Friday)
Time: 5:00 pm
Place: Keio University, Mita campus, South Annex building, 7th floor conference room
https://www.keio.ac.jp/en/maps/mita.html
Online option:
https://keio-univ.zoom.us/j/82972175560?pwd=YlRuaGt0NUFWWmI1ajhrNm1vQ3ZVZz09

Speaker: Linmin Zhang, NYU Shanghai
Title: Degree QUD and maximal informativeness: English even and Chinese jiù and cái
Abstract: 

In this talk, I propose a degree-QUD-based perspective on focus-sensitive particles that involve a scale (i.e., particles represented by English even). I also investigate crosslinguistic even-like particles, featuring Chinese particles jiù and cái. 

The degree-QUD perspective builds on Roberts (1996/2012)’s pioneering work linking Question under Discussion (QUD) and prosodic focus (e.g., in a sentence like "Mary came", if prosodic stress falls on "Mary", it marks new information that resolves the QUD "who came"). For an even-sentence like "Even Mary came" (with stress on "Mary"), a scale is intuitively involved in the interpretation: the utterance of the focus associate, relative to its alternatives, satisfies Grice’s Maxim of Quantity and is maximally informative. Therefore, I propose that association with an ordered alternative set makes an even-sentence necessarily address a contextually salient degree QUD. This perspective captures a range of intuitions about the use of even, including question/answer congruence, norm-sensitive inferences, and its interpretation pattern in polar questions.

I further show that, cross-linguistically, there is a natural class of even-like particles, including Chinese jiù and cái. I show how these particles interact with scales and impose additional requirements on monotonicity (i.e., how moving upward or downward along a scale results in higher sentence-level informativeness).