Event

Professor Athulya Aravind will be giving the second Fall Speaker Series talk on Thursday, October 28th at 3:30pm. It will be held virtually. 

Title: Pragmatics in quantifier acquisition

Abstract: In this talk, I’ll discuss ways in which conditions of language use can both be a help and a hindrance for the child learning quantifier meanings. I will consider two case studies. First, I will show how taking informativity considerations into account can help the child avoid postulating erroneous weaker meanings for universal quantifiers like every (so-called subset problem). In the second case study, I discuss presuppositional quantifiers like both, where some part of the meaning is in fact required to be contextually uninformative.