Polysemy in the Evalutive Sphere \;is a seminar pertaining to the project \;Slurs and the Lexicon: A Rich-Lexicon Approach to Slurs and Other Evaluative Expressions - LEXISLUR \;(https://danzeman.weebly.com/lexislur.html) featuring monthly talks by specialists in polysemy. We cordially invite you to a talk by \;Katarzyna Kijania-Placek &\; Maciej \;Tarnowski \;(Jagiellonian University) \;entitled \; \;"What 'We' Can Mean" (see the abstract below). The event takes place online on \;Friday\, MARCH 27\, 11.00-12.30 Western European Time (WET). Please write to danczeman@gmail.com for the Zoom link.
\nAll welcome!
\nASBTRACT:
\nIn this talk\, we present \;a semantic account of the first-person plural pronoun - "we" in English - that comprises all systematic kinds of use of this expression. We argue that "we" exhibits five systematic types of meaning - directly referential\, descriptive\, deferred\, anaphoric\, and bound - each associated with a distinct Kaplan-style character. We show that these different meanings of "we" satisfy standard diagnostics for systematic polysemy\, including non-zeugmatic co-predication across different senses\, cross-linguistic robustness\, and productivity across other plural pronouns and singular terms. Building on this\, we introduce a two-dimensional model of polysemy in which lexical meaning consists of a set of rule-based characters capable of generating context-sensitive contents. This framework\, which naturally extends to other singular terms\, including demonstratives and proper names\, preserves the Kaplanian treatment of indexicality while explaining descriptive and deferred uses of indexicals.
ORGANIZER;CN=Alba Moreno Zurita;CN=Dan Zeman: METHOD:PUBLISH END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR