Past Event: ELLMM City: Andrew Ollett (Univ. of Chicago)

Title: "What is intended and what isn’t in Indian philosophy of language"

Abstract:
A much-debated principle from the tradition of Vedic interpretation (Mīmāṁsā) held that, under certain circumstances, the grammatical categories of the topic of a sentence, but not its focus, are “unintended.” The principle touches on a range of issues that required thinkers in the seventh and eighth centuries CE to explain how elements of meaning interacted with different kinds of linguistic and non-linguistic structures. It also required them to recognize the gap between what is (literally) expressed and what is (ultimately) meant, and address the problems this gap posed for the principle of compositionality. In this specific case, these thinkers recognized that both singular and plural expressions have “inclusive” readings (i.e., morphologically singular or plural includes semantically plural or singular), and although they did not hit upon a totally convincing solution, we might take a cue from their invocation of information structure to license such readings.