Call for Abstracts

Abstract requirements

  • There will be two talk categories: full talks (40 minutes) and squibs (20 minutes). If you want your abstract to only be considered for one of the two formats, please add "squib" or "full talk" to the list of keywords.
  • 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: May 15th, 12:00 (noon) EST/18:00 CET
    ↪ Deadline extension: May 22nd, 12:00 (noon) EST/18:00 CET
  • Any questions may be sent to hnm2.workshop@aol.com
  • Submit to Easy Chair

Call

Background

Homogeneity is a truth-value gap phenomenon that appears to differ from standard presuppositions both in its pragmatics and in its projection behavior. The paradigmatic examples involve definite plurals (Fodor 1970 a.o.): Neither of the sentences in (1-a) seems true if John read, say, half of the books.

Several other classes of expressions have recently been argued to exhibit homogeneity-like gaps, including generics (1-b) (see e.g. von Fintel 1997, Löbner 2000 a.o), absolute adjectives (1-c) (see e.g. Feinmann 2022, Haslinger & Paillé to appear) and weak necessity modals (1-d) (see e.g. Agha & Jeretič 2022). If these studies are on the right track, homogeneity is widespread throughout the lexicon. Nevertheless, there is no consensus on the constraints on homogeneity and the semantic/pragmatic mechanisms underlying it.

(1)
a. John read the books. / John didn’t read the books.
b. Tigers have stripes. / Tigers don’t have stripes.
c. The door is open. / The door isn’t open.
d. You should go. / You shouldn’t go.

Homogeneity effects often go hand in hand with imprecision, a form of context-dependency by virtue of which sentences may receive truth conditions that are weaker than their strong default interpretation. For instance, in some contexts, (1-a) may be judged true if John read only some of the books (see e.g. Malamud 2012); generics may have near-existential interpretations (cf. Mosquitoes spread malaria; see e.g. Leslie 2008) and a door with a very narrow opening may still count as not open. Since the influential work of Križ (2015, 2016), imprecision has been modeled in terms of a contextually provided QUD parameter; a sentence with a homogeneity gap can count as “true enough” (cf. Lasersohn 1999) in a situation falling into the gap if the QUD does not distinguish this situation from situations making the sentence true. While this general picture is widely accepted for plural predication, there is relatively little work on the complications of extending it to other imprecision phenomena.

Against this background, we invite contributions by semanticists and psycholinguists that address one or more of the following topics.

Topics

  1. Homogeneity beyond plural predication
    Recent work has identified instances of homogeneity outside the domain of plural DPs. Besides the phenomena in (1), examples include conditionals (von Fintel 1997), aspect (Agha 2021), attitude predicates (Gajewski 2005) and predicate and sentential conjunctions (Schmitt 2013), raising the question whether homogeneity is found all over the semantic type hierarchy.

  2. Imprecision beyond plural predication
    There are far-reaching parallels between non-maximality and imprecise uses of round numerals (see e.g. Krifka 2007, Solt 2018) or of total/partial predicates such as wet/dry (see e.g. Lasersohn 1999, Burnett 2017, Feinmann 2020 a.o.). However, there has been relatively little work on extending recent theories of non-maximality to these domains. Relevant questions include what the role of vagueness and probabilistic notions in the pragmatics of these expressions is, and whether there are general constraints on expressions that show imprecision.

  3. Semantic properties of homogeneous predication
    In plural predication, homogeneity could be encoded in the semantics of the predicate or of the plural argument. There is little consensus on this question, and the related issue of how homogeneity effects relate to independently testable properties of plural predicates. For instance, is homogeneity tied to distributive predication? Can cumulative construals be reduced to homogeneity?

  4. Connections between homogeneity and other forms of truth-value gaps
    The view that homogeneity effects involve a new, sui generis type of truth-value gap has recently been challenged from different directions. First, a popular recent approach takes homogeneity gaps to be the result of implicatures (see e.g. Magri 2014, Bar-Lev 2018, Chatain 2022). Second, there have been proposals that revive the idea that homogeneity is a presupposition. Third, an obvious alternative to these “reductionist” accounts is to reanalyze other gap phenomena as instances of homogeneity (see e.g. Goldstein 2019 on free choice).

  5. Homogeneity projection in embedded contexts
    In recent years, there has been a sustained interest in the projection behavior of the gaps induced by definite plurals and how it is influenced by properties like the monotonicity of the embedding environment and the restrictor/nuclear scope distinction. A particularly salient question in this context is whether there are embedding contexts in which homogeneity gaps disappear completely (e.g. Bar-Lev 2020).

  6. Connections between homogeneity and imprecision
    Most recent work on homogeneity has followed Križ (2015, 2016) in taking imprecision to be a consequence of the pragmatics of sentences with truth-value gaps. This predicts that homogeneity and imprecision should go hand in hand unless one of the two properties is not detectable or blocked for independent reasons. It is an open question whether this generalization holds up; relevant phenomena include conjunctions (2-a), which show homogeneity effects but seem to lack imprecision, and round numerals (2-b), which clearly permit imprecision but make gaps hard to detect.

(2)
a. John talked to / didn’t talk to Ann and Bert.
b. Ann owns / doesn’t own 100 cars.

  1. Homogeneous/imprecise expressions cross-linguistically
    Homogeneity has been studied in some non-Indo-European languages (e.g. Szabolcsi & Haddican 2004), but its status as a potential linguistic universal is unknown. Further, we don’t know whether those classes of expressions that exhibit imprecision in well-studied European languages (e.g. definite plurals) systematically do so across languages.

  2. Psycholinguistic methods and acquisition
    Various experimental methods have been developed to elicit and study truth-value gaps. We invite contributions on the methodological question of how gappy judgments should be collected, as well as contributions extending these methods to phenomena that are not standard examples of homogeneity. Further, we are interested in work that investigates homogeneity and imprecision in acquisition, or explores the general question of what acquisition and processing data can tell us about the place of homogeneity in the grammar.