Call for Abstracts

Abstract requirements

  • There will be two talk categories: full talks (40 minutes) and squibs (20 minutes). In the submission form, you will need to indicate whether you want your submission to be considered for either of the two formats or both.
  • The main text of the abstract should be at most 3 pages (Times New Roman, 12pt, 2.5cm margin).
  • References, figures and glossed examples may be added on additional pages exceeding the 3-page limit.
  • Abstracts should be anonymized and submitted in PDF format.
  • Deadline: July 31st, 12:00 (noon) EST/18:00 CET
    ↪ Deadline extension: August 10th, 12:00 (noon) EST/18:00 CET
  • Any questions may be sent to gapsandimprecision@gmail.com
  • Submit to EasyAbs → submissions closed!

Call

This workshop aims to bring together semanticists and psycholinguists interested in

  1. distinguishing or unifying different gap phenomena in natural language (homogeneity, presuppositions, gaps induced by exhaustification, vague predication)
  2. distinguishing or unifying different classes of imprecise expressions, i.e. expressions whose semantic “strength” co-varies with the QUD or discourse goal, and investigating the relation between imprecision and other forms of context-dependent interpretation

Background

The first two editions of the HNM workshop series approached these issues through the lens of homogeneity and non-maximality in plural predication. Homogeneity can be descriptively viewed as a kind of semantic gap between positive and negative sentences, as illustrated in (1), where neither sentence seems straightforwardly true if Ann read just some of the papers. Non-maximality refers to the observation that in some contexts, a plural sentence can be judged true in such a “gap scenario”. For instance, (2) can be judged true in a “some but not all” situation in case one open door is sufficient to enter the building (Krifka 1996).

(1)
a. Ann read the papers. (salient reading: Ann read all the papers)
b. Ann didn’t read the papers. (salient reading: Ann didn’t read any of the papers)

(2) The doors are open.

Recent work has focused on identifying a larger class of phenomena beyond plural predication that show analogous effects, and figuring out whether homogeneity can be reduced to more familiar forms of semantic gaps.

This third edition of the HNM workshop series aims to move this debate forward and extend it by asking which, if any, gap phenomena in natural language ought to receive a unified account, whether non-maximality in cases like (2) should be similarly unified with pragmatically similar phenomena, and how different methods can be brought together to shed light on these issues.

Subtypes of gap phenomena

There is an ongoing debate as to whether cases like (1) belong into a natural class with other gap or strengthening phenomena, such as presuppositions (2), scalar inferences (3) or free choice inferences (4). For instance, homogeneity was traditionally thought of as a presupposition (e.g. Löbner 2000). While this view has been widely rejected in more recent work (e.g. Spector 2013, Kriz 2015), it has recently been revived by Guerrini & Wehbe (2024).

Similarly, it has recently been argued that exhaustification creates presuppositions (Bassi et al. 2021). If so, the gap between (3a) and (3b) should pattern with presuppositions in terms of its projection behavior and pragmatics.

(3)
a. Ann read paper A or paper B. (salient reading: Ann read one, but not both)
b. Ann didn’t read paper A or paper B. (salient reading: Ann read neither)

Independently of this debate, homogeneity is widely thought to be closely related to free choice inferences like (4). Free choice has been variously analyzed as an implicature (Fox 2007, Chierchia 2013), or in terms of non-classical logics (e.g. Goldstein 2019, Aloni 2022); both of these approaches have been extended to homogeneity (see Bar-Lev 2021, Chatain 2021 a.o. for the former and Sbardolini 2023 for the latter approach). The strength of the parallels between free choice and implicatures is a matter of ongoing debate; for instance, experimental work has shown that Free Choice inferences are more robust than standard scalar implicatures (Marty et al. 2021).

(4)
a. You can have coffee or tea. (salient reading: you can have coffee and you can have tea)
b. You can’t have coffee or tea. (salient reading: you can’t have either)

Combining an exh-based theory of homogeneity and free choice with the Presuppositional Exhaustification hypothesis ultimately leads to a theory in which (1), (2), (3) and (4) all involve truth-value gaps of the same kind. The broader question arising from this literature is to what extent a unified treatment of gap phenomena is empirically motivated, and whether differences in the projection pattern, context-sensitivity, and processing and acquisition patterns of the different gap phenomena motivate a distinction between different types of gaps (see e.g. Križ 2015, Bar-Lev 2021, Augurzky et al. 2023, Marty et al. 2021 for discussion).

Identifying natural classes of gappy expressions

Besides the broader question of whether the established classification of gap/strengthening phenomena can be simplified, there is an empirical question of how the boundaries between these classes should be drawn and how homogeneity fits in.

For instance, mass expressions and singular predication with summative predicates like blue in (5) are known to give rise to gaps that, on the face of it, resemble homogeneity gaps. But it is debated whether these gaps arise from the same mechanism as in the plural case (see Chatain 2021 for a unified treatment and Paillé 2022 for an approach in terms of distinct mechanisms).

(5)
a. The flag is blue.
b. The flag isn’t blue.

Within the realm of plural predication, different collective predicates give rise to homogeneity in different ways: some collective predicates don’t seem to give rise to gaps at all, others do, and yet others give rise to so-called sidewards homogeneity (Križ 2015, Chatain 2021, Bar-Lev 2019). Further, the role of homogeneity in cumulative predication (e.g. Chatain 2022) deserves further exploration.

Finally, the excluded middle inferences associated with various modal expressions (7) has been suggested (Križ 2015) to cluster with homogeneity phenomena, in that both give rise to non-maximality and can be canceled by overt quantifiers like all or necessarily (see also Agha & Jeretič 2022, and Schmitt 2023 for a dissenting view).

(7)
a. If A declines the offer, they will hire B.
b. I doubt that if A declines the offer, they will hire B.

Identifying natural classes of imprecision phenomena

With respect to cases of non-maximal plural predication, such as (2), we can ask an analogous question: Does non-maximality belong to a wider natural class of context-dependency phenomena?

When trying to address this question, we face a tension between two core ideas shared by much of the recent literature on non-maximality. First, following Križ 2015, 2016, non-maximality is widely thought to follow from the semantic mechanism underlying homogeneity gaps. Second, the choice between precise and imprecise interpretations is taken to depend directly on the salient QUD or discourse goal: For instance, (2) can be accepted in a “some but not all” situation if for the purposes of the QUD, that situation is on a par with an “all” situation (Malamud 2012, Križ 2015).

The puzzle here is that there are other phenomena that seem to show analogous QUD effects, but lack homogeneity gaps. For instance, imprecise construals of numerals, e.g. a construal of (8) that is acceptable if the exact number of cars is 98, seem to require a QUD for which 98 and 100 cars are on a par, which resembles the pattern found with definite plurals. Yet, bare numerals do not seem to involve homogeneity-like truth-value gaps (and are in fact degraded under negation in many contexts; Solt & Waldon 2019).

(8) John owns 100 cars.
(9) This glass is full.

A similar puzzle arises with absolute adjectives like full in (9), which can be interpreted as “completely full” or not depending on the contextual goals, but does not seem to introduce a homogeneity-like gap. Several authors have suggested unifying some or all of these phenomena (e.g. Lasersohn 1999, Križ 2015, Burnett 2017), but this raises several questions: First, how do we model the apparent lack of homogeneity gaps in cases like (8) and (9) (see e.g. Feinmann 2020)? Second, is there a predictive theory of which instances of imprecision come with gaps and which ones do not? Third, to what extent are “reductionist” approaches to homogeneity (e.g. exh-based and presupposition-based approaches) compatible with a uniform treatment of homogeneity and other imprecision phenomena? The flip side of this problem is that if we attribute imprecision in (8) and (9) and plural non-maximality to distinct mechanisms, the pragmatic parallels between these phenomena remain unexplained.

Methodology

Various methods have been employed to address the questions laid out above. Besides traditional informal judgments, experimental tasks have been developed that target the “robustness” of strengthening phenomena (Marty et al. 2024), their sensitivity to contextual manipulation (Augurzky et al. 2023, Ramotowska et al. 2023 a.o.) or the psychological reality of hypothesized truth-value gaps (Križ & Chemla 2015). All of these have the potential to shed light on which strengthening phenomena fall into natural subclasses.

The trajectory of these inferences in acquisition is also relevant. For instance, Bar-Lev (2021), building on the work of Tieu et al. (2019), argues that assimilating homogeneity to Free Choice implicatures can explain why children interpret plural definites like existential quantifiers.

Finally, cross-linguistic data can also shed light on which phenomena pattern together. For instance, Haslinger (2024) proposes that across languages, imprecise expressions are typically structurally less complex than their precise counterparts. If this hypothesis holds up, it could provide evidence for or against analyzing a given phenomenon as a case of imprecision.

Research topics for the workshop

We welcome contributions addressing one or more of the following research topics:

  • Which gap phenomena ought to be unified, which ought to be distinguished? In particular, how does homogeneity relate to presuppositions and implicatures?
  • How can we derive differences and parallels between the projection patterns of different gap phenomena?
  • Should we aim for a unified account of different imprecision phenomena (e.g. plural predication and numeral imprecision), and if so, how can we account for their different embedding patterns?
  • Several phenomena outside plural semantics (e.g. summative predication, conditionals, neg-raising modals) have been analyzed by analogy with plural homogeneity. To what extent is this analogy justified?
  • Which instances of imprecision – in the sense of QUD-dependent variation between stronger and weaker truth conditions – do we find beyond the standard examples of plurals and numerals, and which of them should receive a unified semantic analysis?
  • How can the recent homogeneity debate and the formal semantics of imprecision phenomena (also outside the plural domain, e.g. imprecise numerals) inform each other?
  • Cross-linguistic research supporting or challenging generalizations about homogeneity and other gap phenomena
  • Imprecise expressions and truth-value gap phenomena cross-linguistically, particularly in understudied languages
  • Homogeneity, imprecision and other truth-value gap phenomena in acquisition
  • Psycholinguistic research comparing the judgments and/or processing signature of the various gap phenomena