We are happy to announce a talk by Janek Guerrini (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.
Date: June 12, 2025
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Exhaustivity in maps
Abstract:
Casati & Varzi (1999) propose a semantics for maps in which color patches work like predicates applying to map regions. For instance, the water marker covering a point on a map amounts to the claim “there is water in the real-world location referent of the map point”. Rescorla (2009) argued that the very treatment of maps as predicative is misguided because as soon as a marker appears on a map, its absence from a coordinate indicates that the corresponding location lacks the property denoted by this marker. According to Rescorla, predication in language is closer to Tarskian predicates, in that the truth of the sentence “Fido is a labrador” does not depend on whether Snoopy is in the extension of “labrador” or not. Theorists like Bronner (2015) have resisted this intuition, arguing that exhaustive interpretations in maps are the result of pragmatic strengthening.
In this paper, I improve on Bronner’s proposal, and show that by assuming that maps answer an implicit Question under Discussion we can make specific predictions as to when predicates denoted by markers are interpreted exhaustively. In a nutshell, the primary meaning of maps provides a partial answer to a QUD, which is then strengthened to a complete answer. I illustrate one way in which this strengthening may occur via (Neo-)Gricean reasoning about more informative alternative maps. I also provide a recursive definitions of the set of alternatives of an arbitrary map responding to an arbitrary Question under Discussion. I then discuss some asymmetries between natural language exhaustivity and map exhaustivity, and show that exhaustivity is more frequent in maps than in natural language simply because maps happen to gather a number of conditions that determine exhaustive interpretations across communicative means. When natural language sentences meet these conditions, they are interpreted exhaustively as well. I thus argue that while Casati and Varzi’s (1999) proposal ought to be maintained, their clause for map markers should be updated. Casati and Varzi have map markers ascribe their correspondent property to their extension, and the negation of that property to their complement extension. Instead, I propose that predicates be semantically silent about their complement extension: exhaustivity should come as a pragmatic strengthening of the meaning of the map.