🚀 go-pugleaf

Dear all,

Should any linguists be interested, I am giving a talk in the Philosophy
department a week from today, in a seminar series put on by the Committee
on the History and Philosophy of Science.

Title: "Prosody and Information Structure: Iconicity and Inference" 
Time: 3:30 March 16 
Place: Hellems 229 

Basic idea: I will be looking at theories which propose a connection
between the primary sentence stress and the scope of assertion in the
sentence. I will critique a model of this connection offered by Dwight
Bolinger in the 50s and early 60s. This model holds that sentence accent
is ICONIC, in that it marks the 'information point' of the sentence. I
will propose an alternative theory based on focus CONSTRUCTIONS, which are
grammatical mediators between semantic categories (two of which were
recognized in the 19th century work of the German philosophers Brentano
and Marty) and prosodic form. In so doing, I will argue against views
which propose a grammatical category of CONTRASTIVE FOCUS, proposing
instead that contrast is a Gricean quantity inference. 

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Laura A. Michaelis, Ph.D.
Department of Linguistics - CB 295
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309
Office: (303) 492-1990
http://spot.Colorado.EDU/~michaeli/Home.html
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