Today, 2nd May 2023, we’ll be welcoming Daniel Altshuler (Oxford) to the LEL seminar. He will speak on “Clause-internal coherence: A look at deverbal adjectives”. The talk will take place at the usual time, 4.10 pm in Simon 2.61, and it’ll be live-streamed on Zoom. All are welcome!
Clause-internal coherence: A look at deverbal adjectives
Daniel Altshuler
(Joint work with Kelsey Sasaki)
Oxford University
Hobbs (2010) introduced ‘clause-internal coherence’ (CIC) to describe inferences in, e.g., ‘A jogger was hit by a car,’ where the jogging is understood to have led to the car-hitting. Cohen & Kehler (2021) argue that well-known pragmatic tools cannot account for CIC, motivating an enrichment account familiar from discourse coherence research. Beyond this, clause-internal coherence has received little formal attention; one of many outstanding questions is how to compositionally derive clause internal coherence from clause external coherence relations. In this talk, we explore the semantics and pragmatics of deverbal adjectives (e.g. ‘drenched’, viz. ‘A drenched child was hit with a water ballon’) and propose that CIC is sometimes the byproduct of presupposition resolution, couching our analysis in SDRT (Asher & Lascarides 1998) and providing motivation from experimental findings. Our research sheds new light on how presupposition relates to anaphora resolution and coherence, while also contributing to recent work on adjectival meaning in discourse.
Manchet 
Posted on May 2, 2023 by manling