Séminaire SynSem avec Yasutada Sudo (University College London)

Title: Varieties of sortal restrictions: ingestion verbs and classifiers
(based on joint work with Tim Jantarunsee and Christopher Davis)

Abstract: Predicates in natural language often come with lexically specified sortal restrictions on arguments. While the existence of sortal restrictions is uncontroversial, it seems that they are commonly thought to be amenable to a uniform presuppositional analysis. Contrary to this, we show that there is in fact considerable variation among sortal restrictions. In the first half of the talk, we focus on verbs of ingestion, and discuss three types of sortal restrictions, drawing data from three typologically unrelated languages: presuppositional restrictions in English (Indo-European), mandatory scalar implicature\ in Japanese (Japonic), and relevance-based restrictions in Mlabri (Austro-Asiatic). Among these, relevance-based restrictions require a novel theory and we will make a concrete proposal. In the second half o the talk, we will use the proposed theory of relevance-based restrictions to analyze classifiers in Thai and Japanese