Meaning Meeting - Fëdor Golosov / Bare singulars
Meaning Meeting - Fëdor Golosov / Bare singulars
Tuesday October 21 at the Meaning Meeting, Fedya presents his dissertation work on the semantics and dynamics of bare singulars in in languages without articles, focussing on Russian.
In articless languages, bare singular NPs are sometimes bad in so-called anti-unique sequences, that is, sentences where the same NP is repeated at least twice but each time it is used to speak about a different referent:
(1) Context. I see two dogs on the street, one of them is barking and the other one is growling.
#Na ulice sobaka lajet i sobaka ryčit.
on street dog barks and dog growls
Intended: 'On the street, a dog is barking and a dog is growling.'
In my recent MACSIM talk, I argued that the oddity of the sentences like in (1) has nothing to do with the semantics of the bare singulars (which are existential quantifiers), but is a side effect of a pragmatic constraint: do not use an NP with the restrictor N to refer to x if the discourse already contains y such that N(y). However, after the talk I started being more skeptical about this solution (primarily because it is challenging to extend this constraint to other types of expressions that can be used to speak about individuals), and I would like to discuss a potential solution "in the middle" (between pragmatics and semantics) implemented within the situation semantics with some involvement of the QUD approach.