Larson’s musical forces of gravity, magnetism and inertia link music to metaphors of physical motion. Schlenker’s music semantics is based on similar physical world associations. Because Larson’s forces are about note movements towards harmonic stability, his framework implies note groupings at stable boundaries, given common cadential harmony. These groupings with forces assignments can then be viewed as musical events in Schlenker’s approach, and mapped to structure-preserving external (world) events as required for this author’s semantics. To this end, Schlenker’s truth definition, specifying when an event is ‘true of’ a musical expression, will be adapted. The synthesis amounts to what Schlenker argues for: a formal semantics of music, albeit limited to melodic lines confined to a single key.
provided information on the kónkóló timeline’s metric / rhythmic structure as unique inputs, and the predictive outputs in the music, such as specific syllabic and rhythmic generation, movement and dance patterns, and other socio-cultural layers that constitute the full experience of Yoruba music. This also include perspectives on the social and affective features of kónkóló patterns.
In his target article on “Scented Colours”, Charles Spence highlights the importance of crossmodal connections by focusing on the interaction between odors and colors. In this commentary and our presentation of own empirical work in this research context, we want to reach out further by emphasizing this importance not only on a perceptual and representational level, but also highlight it as an example for spatial cognition research. We provide an evaluation study on emotional effects of odors that could be used in future interdisciplinary research. While the meaning of odors in spatial wayfinding is, thus far, not well investigated, we want to briefly introduce the current research state, focus on new and valuable research strains in this area as an example for the importance of odors in cognitive research.
Artists have long been interested in the crossmodal links that exist between colour and scent. While traditionally envisioned as a kind of synaesthesia, contemporary accounts of the connections between this particular pair of senses have typically focused on explanations in terms of involuntarily-induced crossmodal mental imagery and crossmodal correspondences instead. A large body of empirical research now supports the view that the majority of non-synaesthetic individuals do indeed systematically match colours to odours, via semantic (or source-object based) matching, and/or on the basis of emotional-mediation or perceptual similarity. Universal agreement with regard to the bestmatching colours for odours is, however, never obtained. What is more, the consensuality of the crossmodal mappings obtained within groups of individuals (and especially across culture, and age) tend to decline when one moves away from semanticallybased crossmodal matches. As such, the longstanding aim amongst certain artists to play with the abstract correspondences between scent, colour, and, on occasion, also sound in order to try to deliver universally-meaningful crossmodal correspondences seems unlikely ever to be realized. Nevertheless, that does not mean that scent and colour can’t still be linked in intriguing ways, as illustrated by a number of the exhibits at the 2015 Tate Sensorium multisensory exhibition in London.
Semantic theories predict that the dimension for comparison given a sentence like A gleebed more than B depends on what the verb gleeb means: if gleeb expresses a property of events, the evaluation should proceed by number; if it expresses a property of processes, any of distance, duration, or number should be available. An adequate test of theories like this requires first determining, independently of language, the conditions under which people will understand a novel verb to be true of a series of events or a single ongoing process. We investigate this prior question by studying people’s representation of two cues in simple visual scenes: a) whether some happening is interrupted by temporal pauses, and b) whether and how the speed of an object’s motion changes. We measured representation by probing people’s choice of verb in free-form descriptions of the scenes, and how they segment the scenes for the purposes of counting. We find evidence that both types of cues shape people’s representation of simple motions as events or processes, but in different ways.
This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the 13th International Symposium on Cognition, Logic and Communication which took place in Riga, at the University of Latvia on December 8-9 2018.
The relation between vision and language is analyzed through a formal statement of what defines objecthood in the two domains. An interpretation of independently-motivated approaches to vision and to the grammar of nominals allows us to define the connection between them as an “infomorphism” consisting of two functions. Visual and linguistic objects are only indirectly related: the functions range over types and tokens, whose map defines objecthood in each domain. We show how the inferences proved in this system are empirically correct, and we draw some conclusions about the import of our proposal on the role of language in cognition.
The theory of events as property-instances has been considered one of the most widely accepted metaphysical theories of events. On the other hand, several philosophers claim that if both events and objects perdure, then objects must be identified with events. In this work, I investigate whether these two views can be held together. I shall argue that if they can, it depends on the particular theory of instantiation one is to adopt. In particular, I shall conclude that the theory of events as property-instances and the view that identifies objects with events can be held together only if instances of eventive universals are temporal parts of objects – namely, those temporal parts that have the universals in question.
In "Irony as Expression (of a Sense of the Absurd)" Mitchell Green is presenting an interesting account of communicative irony where ``we express a sense of a situation's absurdity (wackiness, goofiness, etc.).'' In this line of argument, he is questioning the adequateness of irony as meaning-inversion and irony as conversational implicature. In this note, we would like to take the idea of absurdity a little bit further, considering it in its logical sense. As a consequence we can offer a possibility to defend, at least partially, irony as meaning-inversion and conversational implicature.
Situational irony is, first, explained as a severe violation of one or more established, non-moral norms; such violation constitutes that situation’s absurdity. The classical “inversion” theory of communicative irony associated with Cicero and Quintilian, as well as its refinement in terms of the notion of conversational implicature (Grice 1989), are then shown to be inadequate. The echoic (Sperber (1984), Wilson (2006), Wilson & Sperber (2012)) and pretence (Currie 2010) theories are also shown to fail to account for the broad range of communicative irony, although they each contain valuable insights. Further, both theories hold that ironic speakers express attitudes but do not explain how they do so. On the basis of prior work by Green conceptualizing the notion of expression as signaling and showing a psychological state, we defend a view of communicative irony as expressing a sense of a situation’s absurdity. The view generalizes beyond absurdity to encompass expression of a sense of situations’ silliness, wackiness, or goofiness, and accommodates milder forms of irony such as we find in meiosis. 1. SITUATIONAL, DRAMATIC, AND COMMUNICATIVE IRONY Although they may not be common to all human cultures, ironic utterances are a familiar fixture of everyday conversation in (at the very Irony as Expression 2 least) modern Western societies.Such utterances partake of humor, indirection, and sometimes criticism either of a person, institution, culture, or even an entire sensibility. Typically-developing children at age 6 can grasp simple forms of irony, the appreciation of which is impaired with certain kinds of right hemisphere damage and autism.1 Theories of irony commonly distinguish among situational, dramatic, and “verbal” irony.2(My reason for shudder-quotes around the last of these will be apparent presently.) Dramatic irony does not appear to raise difficult analytical questions: it simply occurs whenever an audience of a dramatic work knows something that a character in that work does not. Our focus in what follows will be on the third of these three, but it will be helpful to pause over what makes something a case of situational irony, as well as how it relates to (what we will presently call) communicative irony. As popularly characterized, situational irony consists in the thwarting of an expectation or aim.3 This, however, is too broad as a characterization of irony, since, for instance, one’s failing to make it through an intersection before the traffic signal turns red is not—aside from instances of preciosity described below–a case of situational irony. Nor is it, in general, ironic when a house burns down. Rather, to achieve situational irony, the thwarting of the aim must occur in a way that is absurd, perverse, or a contravention of an agent’s or institution’s ostensible purpose. It is a terrible thing when any house burns down, but when a firehouse burns to the ground, we also have irony. Similarly, it is not ironic when a typical driver gets arrested on a Driving Under the Influence (DUI) violation. However, it is ironic when the President of the local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) is arrested under such conditions. Fire houses and the firefighters who work in them are devoted to the prevention of fires. As a result there is something absurd or perverse about a firehouse burning to the ground, whereas when any other kind of house burns down we have tragedy only. Similarly when a mother who is ostensibly devoted to the prevention of drunk driving is pulled over on a DUI, that creates a situation that is absurd. Following the approach of Green (2007), who in turn takes inspiration from Nagel (1971), we may construe absurdity as consisting in a behavior, institution, or artifact that severely violates established, non-moral norms. Uttering gibberish is absurd because it severely violates estab-
It has often been argued that functional individuating classifiers and plural count nouns ought to be in complementary distribution (e.g. Borer 2005, Chierchia 2010). This apparently works neatly for Chinese and English. Russian, however, is an interesting case. On the one hand it has count nouns which can be directly modified by numerals. On the other hand it has three classifiers, štuka ‘item’, čelovek ‘person’ and golova ‘head’, which optionally occur in numeral constructions with plural nouns and look very much like functional individuating classifiers (cf. Sussex 1976, Yadroff 1999). I show that a closer look at the data reveals that apparently count constructions using these optional classifiers have properties of measure constructions such as five liters of water. Based on that I argue that these classifiers are not individuating classifiers but are measure words which measure mass denotations in terms of natural units in the sense of Krifka (1989, 1995).
Within the group of imperfective motion verbs in Russian there exists a further subdivision into determinate and indeterminate verbs. Traditionally the distinction is said to lie in the direction of motion the verbs encode: motion in one direction or in different directions. In this paper I am going to argue that this distinction is not enough. I will claim that determinate verbs encode singular eventualities and indeterminate verbs are pluractional. Thus in the normal case, imperfective verbs are plural predicates which include singular and plural events in their denotations, in the case of motion verbs, imperfective denotations are subdivided into a singular and a pluractional predicate.
Much literature has explored the interpretation of the bare singular (BS) in Brazilian Portuguese. Pires de Oliveira and Rothstein (2011) claim that BS nouns are mass because they denote kinds and argue that this explains why only the BS in Brazilian Portuguese can have a non-cardinal interpretation. In this paper, based on an experimental task with Brazilian Portuguese adult speakers, we explore one of their predictions, namely that the ‘volume interpretation’ of the BS cannot be explained as a case of Grinding. Our results show that Grinding and Volume readings of a BS noun are not equivalent (in favor of their hypothesis). We also show that a volume interpretation of a noun is never preferred when a cardinal interpretation is available, but that this can be explained by other lexical and pragmatic factors. We conclude by suggesting that Rothstein’s (in press) distinction between counting and measuring accounts for the fact that non-cardinal readings are not grinding.
In obligatory classifier languages like Japanese, numerals cannot directly modify nouns without the help of a classifier. It is standardly considered that this is because nouns in obligatory classifier languages have ‘uncountable denotations’, unlike in non-classifier languages like English, and the function of classifiers is to turn such uncountable denotations into something countable (Chierchia 1998a,b, Krifka 2008, among many others). Contrary to this view, it is argued that what makes Japanese an obligatory classifier language is not the semantics of nouns but the semantics of numerals. Specifically, evidence is presented that numerals in Japanese cannot function as predicates on their own, which is taken as evidence that the extensions of numerals in Japanese are exclusively singular terms. It is then proposed that the semantic function of classifiers is to turn such singular terms into modifiers/predicates. It is furthermore claimed that the singular terms denoted by numerals are abstract entities (cf. Rothstein 2013, Scontras 2014a,b), and proposed that the reason why they cannot have modifier/predicate uses in obligatory classifier languages like Japanese is because the presence of classifiers in the lexicon blocks the use of a type-shifting operator that turns singular terms denoted by numerals into predicates (cf. Chierchia 1998a,b).
The background for this paper is the framework of Boolean semantics for mass and count nouns, and singular and plural count nouns, as developed from the work of Godehard Link in Link 1983 (see e.g. the expositions in Landman 1991, 2010). Link-style Boolean semantics for nouns (here called Mountain semantics) analyzes the oppositions mass-count and singular-plural in terms of the notion of atomicity: counting is in terms of singular objects, which are taken to be atoms. Consequently, Link bases his semantics on two separate Boolean domains: a non-atomic mass domain and an atomic count domain. Singular count nouns are interpreted as sets of atoms, and semantic plurality is closure under sum, so plural objects are sums of atoms. In this, sorted setup portions - like two portions of soup - are a puzzle: they are mass stuff - soup -, but count - two. But in order to be count they must be atoms. But they are not, because they are just soup. Mountain semantics can deal with portions, but at a cost. In the first part of this paper I outline Iceberg semantics, an alternative to Mountain semantics within the general framework of Boolean semantics. Iceberg semantics specifies a compositional mechanism which associates with the standard denotation of any noun phrase (here called the body) a base set, a set that generates the body under the sum operation ⊔. For count nouns, the base is the set in terms of which the members of the body are counted and to which distribution takes place. In Iceberg semantics, what allows counting to be correct is the requirement on the interpretations of count nouns that the base of their interpretation is (contextually) disjoint. Already at this level we see two salient properties of Iceberg semantics: -Atoms and atomicity play no role in the theory, so we can assume an unsorted interpretation domain for mass nouns and count nouns. In Iceberg semantics, mass and count can be seen as different perspectives on the same stuff (different bases for the same body). This means that we can do away with the extreme body-sorting and body-gridding that atomicity entails. With this we allow a simpler and more elegant analysis of mass-count interactions. For instance, portions can just be 'mass' stuff, evaluated relative to a count base. -The mass-count distinction is formulated in terms of disjointness of the base. Iceberg semantics associates bases not just with the interpretations of lexical nouns, but with NPs in general and with DPs. This means that Iceberg semantics provides a compositional semantic theory of the mass-count distinction, and hence it provides a framework in which the mass-count nature of complex NPs and of DPs can be fruitfully studied. It is the analysis of complex NPs and their mass-count properties that is the focus of the second part of this paper. There I develop an analysis of English and Dutch pseudo- partitives, in particular, measure phrases like three liters of wine and classifier phrases like three glasses of wine. We will study measure interpretations and classifier interpretations of measures and classifiers, and different types of classifier interpretations: container interpretations, contents interpretations, and - indeed - portion interpretations. Rothstein 2011 argues that classifier interpretations (including portion interpretations) of pseudo partitives pattern with count nouns, but that measure interpretations pattern with mass nouns. I will show that this distinction follows from the very basic architecture of Iceberg semantics.
The possible interpretations of container phrases (such as ‘cups of sugar’) has been long debated in the formal semantics literature because container phrases can be associated with a variety of possible readings that go from individuation to measure. In this paper we explore the interpretation of container phrases in Yudja (Tupi stock, Brazil), a language where container phrases are optional in construction with numerals and are morphosyntactically identical to locative phrases. Based on experimental studies with Yudja children and adults we intend to show that these expressions are ambiguous in at least three ways (locative, individuation and measure) and that a locative reading might emerge even in scenarios where the verb and the context favor a measure interpretation. Furthermore, this paper provides evidence that there is no hidden container phrase when numerals are combined with notional mass nouns and that, supporting Partee and Borschev (2012), the results of the studies show that, indeed, the individuation reading is more “primitive”, i.e. it precedes measuring in language acquisition.
