Workshop on Modality and Subjectivity

The program and further useful information is available at:

http://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/faculty/subjectivity_in_language_and_thought/workshops/

The Dept. of Linguistics and the Workshop on Linguisitics and Philosophy at the Unviersity of Chicago are organizing a one-day workshop on Modality and Subjectivity. 

The treatment of modal expressions in language is grounded in modal logic. Kratzer enriches the logical framework by introducing new parameters such modal bases and ordering sources. These enable a more refined interpretation of subtle distinctions such as epistemic, deontic, bouletic, and teleological modality (see Portner 2009).  At the same time, ongoing crosslinguistic formal semantic work resulted in broadening the phenomena studied under modality and revealed considerable variation in the mapping between meanings and forms. As a result, modality has been connected to notions such as nonveridicality, evaluation and bias (Giannakidou and Mari 2013).  There now seems to be consensus that by modalizing a sentence an individual anchor is, at a very fundamental level, commenting on the proposition, and this commenting often involves weakening the epistemic commitment of the anchor. This appears to characterize also evidential markers. Modality thus appears to involve subjective dimensions (what individuals anchors believe or know, what kind of evidence they have)—and this is the broad context that serves as the background for our workshop. 

SPEAKERS

Cleo Condoravdi, Stanford University

Jonathan Howell, Montclair State

Matt Mandelkern, MIT

Alda Mari, Institut Jean Nicod, ENS, CNRS

Lilia Rissman, Chicago

Tamara Vardomskaya, Chicago

Igor Yanovich, MIT