Hi, I am Tomasz Klochowicz

Slides

Assertions with scalar terms such as some and or famously yield pragmatic inferences negating their stronger alternatives all and and, respectively. According to Chierchia et al. (2004), these inferences disappear in environments licensing weak NPIs like any. However, examples provided by Magri (2011) and Hurford disjunctions of scalar terms in question still behave as if the implicatures were computed. Moreover, questions with scalar terms are sensitive to context and prior beliefs of the speaker. I propose to generalise the exhaustification operator to work on questions and derive implicatures in questions as a negative biased to the questions in the alternative set.

Slides

The similarity approach to conditionals (Stalnaker 1968, Lewis 1973) predicts Reciprocity to be valid: whenever 𝐴 > 𝐵, 𝐵 > 𝐴 and 𝐴 > 𝐶 are true, 𝐵 > 𝐶 is true (where 𝐴 > 𝐵 denotes if 𝐴 would 𝐵). We ran an experiment to test the validity of this rule. Strikingly, half of our participants judged the rule invalid, i.e. judged in at least one scenario that it does not preserve truth. Our data also challenge Kratzer’s (2012) and Fine’s (2012) semantics of conditionals, but we show that McHugh’s (2022) aboutness approach can account for our data.

Slides

Several inferences in natural language deviate from classical logic, among them upper- bound inferences normally analysed as scalar implicatures, distributive infer- ences of disjunction but also certain empty-set effects in the interpretation of (mostly) downward-entailing quantifiers such as less than. We present a direct empirical comparison sug- gesting that diverse tools are needed to capture the processing of these inferences.

Abstract

The similarity approach to conditionals (Stalnaker 1968, Lewis 1973) predicts Reciprocity to be valid: whenever 𝐴 > 𝐵, 𝐵 > 𝐴 and 𝐴 > 𝐶 are true, 𝐵 > 𝐶 is true (where 𝐴 > 𝐵 denotes if 𝐴 would 𝐵). We ran an experiment to test the validity of this rule. Strikingly, half of our participants judged the rule invalid, i.e. judged in at least one scenario that it does not preserve truth. Our data also challenge Kratzer’s (2012) and Fine’s (2012) semantics of conditionals, but we show that McHugh’s (2022) aboutness approach can account for our data.

Slides

The MECORE project by Uegaki et al. (2022) provides a cross-linguistic database of clause- embedding predicates, which provides empirical confirmation or falsification to the hypotheses postulated in the literature. I present a Python package which allows for the analysis of the collected data, verification of the existing hypotheses about the selectional behaviour of those predicates, and discovery of novel hypotheses using Machine Learning.

Slides

To address the issue of BSML with Wide Scope Obligation, we propose that this splitting not only affects the state of evluation, but also the accessibility relation. Splitting represents a tendency to entertain different alternatives (possibilities) separately. These alternatives can be ‘actual’, when the state is split, but they can also be modal, when the relation is split. The resulting logics preserves all the important Free Choice inferences from BSML, without falling into the problem of Wide Scope Obligation. We will also propose an alternative solution, which treats states of evaluation as sets of paths, and not sets of worlds.

Abstract

You can see the current draft version of the Free Choice Questions paper here.

Slides

Abstract: Polar questions like ‘May I go to the park or to the beach?’ give rise to inferences similar to Free Choice Permission. The Yes answer to these questions corresponds to the permission to freely choose between going to the park and going to the beach. No corresponds to Dual Prohibition, i.e., prohibition to go to either place. I empirically tested these intuitions. I will indicate how the collected data can allow us to establish the source of these inferences and compare the findings to predictions made by current theories of Free Choice extended with question semantics. The collected data poses a challenge to the semantic and scalar approaches to free choice and supports non-scalar pragmatics as a uniform solution to the free choice puzzle.

Poster presentation. The poster is avaliable here: Poster

Abstract: This paper’s main focus lies on the compositional semantics of clause-embedding predicates, i.e. verbs or verb-like expressions that represent a relationship between a subject and a proposition. It provides an improved characterisation of the selectional behaviour of the classes of responsive and anti-rogative predicates in terms of their semantic properties. I propose refinements of the hypotheses by Uegaki and Sudo (2019) and Roelofsen and Uegaki(2021), that are falsified by empirical data. My new proposals are that all non-veridical and positively preferential predicates are anti-rogative and that all responsive predicates are either Q-to-P or P-to-Q distributive. The latter hypothesis can be alternatively formulated as: “sentences with corresponding interrogative and declarative complements embedded under the same predicate are always related by entailment.