11 June 2015, Crosslinguistic semantics (XLSX) colloquium, Henk Zeevat

After the talk there will be drinks to celebrate Henk's 25 year jubilee at the UvA. You are all very welcome!

Abstract:

After a defence of typologically valid semantic features in lexical semantics, the talk will attempt to argue that typology is also informative about the primitives of a semantic account of natural languages. In particular, it will be argued that a universal semantic account should not have generalised quantifiers as primitives, since they are not a universal feature of natural languages, witness the language St'at'imcets. But Montague grammar without universal quantifiers is an almost empty system. The talk will run though an alternative in which generalised quantifiers result from the set classification devices needed for St'at'imcets and an optional feature: a distributivity operator.

The talk can be interpreted -though this is historically inaccurate- as motivating the speaker's departure from Amsterdam to Duesseldorf.