A weblog on semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and intersections thereof
CSSP 03 - The Fifth Syntax and Semantics Conference in Paris will take place October 2-4, 2003, with a general session and a thematic session on “Syntax and Semantics of Number”. The abstract deadline is April 30, 2003.
A new version of Angelika Kratzer’s paper on telicity is available at the semanticsarchive.
Sinn und Bedeutung 8 will be held in Frankfurt, September 29th – October 1st, 2003. The deadline for abstract submissions is June 15th, 2003.
Paul Dekker has posted a draft manuscript with the modest title “A Proper Architecture for Presupposition and Quantification” on his papers page.
The 15th European Summer School in Logic Language and Information will take place in Vienna from August 18 to 29, 2003. Most interesting are a number of workshops:
Direct Reference and Specificity (Deadline: March 15, 2003)
Conditional and Unconditional Modality (Deadline: March 7, 2003)
The Meaning and Implementation of Discourse Particles (Deadline: April 4, 2003)
The call for papers for the The Fifth International Tbilisi Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation (October 6-10, 2003) is out. The deadline for submission is April 1, 2003.
A paper by Chris Barker and Gina Taranto called The Paradox of Asserting Clarity has just appeared on the semanticsarchive. It deals with examples like It is clear that Mary is a doctor. It looks relevant to my upcoming course on modes of assertion. Gina also has a short summary of her qualifying paper work on discourse adjectives.
[Found via FOS News]
The Chronicle for Higher Education has a short article about Creative Commons. It mentions that MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative plans to license our materials under the Creative Commons license.
Barbara Partee sends an email with the news that the most recent update of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) now includes the term “Montague Grammar”. She writes:
If your institution has a subscription to the online edition, you can see it. I don’t know whether having the web links below will help, or whether you just have to figure out how to get there through your library. The ‘front page’ link is below, and if you get there, you can just enter Montague grammar in the ‘find word’ box and be taken to it. The second link below is the actual entry. It was evidently added December 12; I knew it was supposed to happen in December, but I only found it just now.
http://dictionary.oed.com/entrance.dtl
http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00315183
If you don’t have access, you can ask somebody who does (e.g. me) to go to the entry and then “mail” it to you — you’ll get a link which will be good for 3 days.
It will appear in the next print edition. That will take awhile; they’ve been working on this comprehensive revision since 1993, and publishing the results in quarterly installments online since 2000.
Of course the term is now mainly ‘historical’ — and I told them so when they were getting me to help them with it — but that’s apparently quite normal for the OED.
They give both British and American pronunciations for ‘Montague’ — I first became aware of the difference when Arnim von Stechow was visiting Amherst years ago and started using the British (approximately same as German) pronunciation and then switched to an exaggerated version of the American pronunciation (different first vowel and no ‘t’) (to tease us.)
I was really impressed with the researchers. They had correctly tracked down the first occurrence to Bob Rodman’s 1972 edited UCLA occasional papers (the ‘Unicorn volume’), and had tracked me down as its apparent originator, which is also correct (I double-checked), and we had an interesting correspondence.
I didn’t have the address of everyone I could think of to share the news with — feel free to spread the word. Maybe let’s the world of (sometime) Montague grammarians and friends and family of Montague grammarians drink an extra toast to Montague on New Year’s Eve!
Cheers,
Barbara
Coming next: I will structure the home pages for the courses I’m teaching in this Spring 2003 semester as weblogs: my 24.910 undergraduate seminar on modes of assertion and my 24.973 graduate class on advanced semantics.
I got this blog up and running. Since some of the Mac OS X specific instructions on the web were faulty, I will at some point write up the steps I followed. Here is a plan for this log.
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