Interdisciplinary Colloquium
Dr. Itai Bassi, Tel Aviv University
As part of the department’s weekly research colloquium,
held every Thursday from 16:15 to 17:45 in the Webb Building,
the following lecture by Dr. Itai Bassi from Tel Aviv University will take place:
Pathological Alternative Sets, Ellipsis, and the Theory of Triviality
Abstract:
Some sentences that are logically trivial (tautologies or contradictions) are nevertheless felicitously uttered in many contexts. A prominent line of work explains this by tying felicity to whether the triviality can give rise to some non-trivial inference, either in the semantics or in the pragmatics. In this talk I apply this line of thinking to a puzzle discovered by Stockwell (2022): tautologous conditionals as in (1) are felicitous but do not tolerate ellipsis (or deaccenting) of the second VP, as in (2), even though the ellipsis site has an identical antecedent in the if-clause.
(1) If John is wrong, then he is wrong! (what are you gonna do?)
(2) #If John is wrong, then he is __! (what are you gonna do?) (Stockwell 2022)
Other trivialities behave differently: tautologous disjunctions (Either he is wrong or he isn’t __) are fine with ellipsis. I propose that what goes wrong in (2) has to do with its triviality interacting with its particular focus structure. Specifically, it evokes alternatives which are all trivial and which therefore cannot be put to any use: they do not define a sensible underlying question (Katzir 2024), and cannot yield a non-trivial implicature from the trivial semantics (echoing independent ideas entertained in Spector 2014). More broadly, the proposal suggests that a logically trivial statement is tolerated as long as it addresses a sensible question, but not if it can only be understood as addressing a trivial question. I compare this analysis with Stockwell’s own proposal, which attributes the infelicity in (2) to a new Contrast condition on ellipsis. I show that the Contrast condition both under- and over-generates, and is not needed in light of the alternative account.
All are welcome!
