Tim Bray draws attention to the fact that there is “a new kind of punctuation”:http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/03/27/StarStar gaining favor. I wonder whether “Geoff Nunberg”:http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/ — the author of “a book on punctuation”:http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/7277.ctl — has taken notice (or has already written about it — I confess to having a hard time keeping up). Geoff lists some further work on punctuation on “his research page”:http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/research.html.
PS Geoff e-mailed me to say that “I haven’t done anything on the asterisk business (but Alex Lascarides and I are doing some work on punctuation now, and this might be interesting). But I did do a Fresh Air “piece on smileys”:http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/smileys.html a couple of years ago, chiefly wondering what use writers like Kafka and Jane Austen would have made of the device.”
The “Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists”:http://www.improb.com/projects/hair/hair-club-top.html has a number of friends and colleagues as members: Daniel Büring, David Chalmers, Jeff Pelletier, Steven Pinker, Norvin Richards. Once upon a time, I might have qualified, but now I would only qualify for a possible companion club: the pony-tailed scientist club.
“Kent Bach”:http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kbach/. Context ex Machina. to appear in Semantics vs. Pragmatics, Zoltan Szabo (ed.), Oxford University Press. DRAFT — comments appreciated (kbach@sfsu.edu)
This is exciting. “Greg Carlson”:http://www.ling.rochester.edu/people/carlson/carlson.html has made a pdf-version of his 1977 dissertation “Reference to Kinds in English”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jk3NzRlY/ available on the “semanticsarchive”:http://semanticsarchive.net/. Note that the file is a scanned version, side by side, and thus of course quite large (5.5MB).
PS Greg informs me that the credit due to Chris Barker — together with Peter Lasersohn the master of the semanticsarchive –, who handscanned Greg’s pre-computer thesis to make it available on the archive. Chris tells me that they hope to publish further classic dissertations.
[via Online Papers in Philosophy]
“Michael Glanzberg”:http://web.mit.edu/philos/www/glanzberg.html and “Susanna Siegel”:http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~ssiegel/. “Policing and Presupposition in Complex Demonstratives”:http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~ssiegel/papers/cds/cdm.pdf. Also available in “html”:http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~ssiegel/papers/cds/cd.html (no footnotes in html version)
bq. We argue that in classic perceptual uses of that F, the nominal F plays what we call a “policing role” with respect the proposition semantically expressed by utterances in which the use occurs: roughly speaking, no proposition is semantically expressed by an utterance of That F is G if no contextually appropriate object is F. We argue for this on grounds that are independent of whether complex demonstratives are quantificational, referring expressions, or something else. (The draft posted here is a revised version of the draft posted in January. Comments are still welcome).
[via “Online Papers in Philosophy”:http://philosophypapers.blogspot.com/]
“Jason Stanley”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jasoncs/. “Context, Interest-Relativity, and the Sorites”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jasoncs/Sorites.pdf. Forthcoming in: Analysis (October, 2003).
“Luisa Martí”:http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~mmm97002/ has made two papers available plus the abstract of her dissertation:
“Abstract”:http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~mmm97002/abstractthesis.pdf of “Contextual Variables”
“Only, Context Reconstruction, and Informativity”:http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~mmm97002/nels33.pdf. Paper based on a talk given at NELS 33 (MIT, Boston) in November 2002.
“Intonation, Scope, and Restrictions on Quantifiers”:http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~mmm97002/wccfl.pdf. Paper based on a talk given at WCCFL XX (University of Southern California, Los Angeles) and at the 11th Colloquium in Generative Grammar (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain) in the spring of 2001.
“Outline for a Truth Conditional Semantics for Tense”, Lepore, E., & Ludwig, K. (2003). In Q. Smith & A. Jokic (Eds.), Tense, Time and Reference (pp. 49-105). Cambridge: MIT Press. View: (in .pdf format).
The “program”:http://depts.washington.edu/salt13/preprogram.html for “SALT 13″:http://depts.washington.edu/salt13/ is out.
“Luis Alonso-Ovalle”:http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~luisalo/index.html and Paula Menéndez-Benito: “Some Epistemic Indefinites”:http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~luisalo/algun.pdf. (2003). To appear in Makoto Kadowaki and Shigeto Kawahara (eds.), Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society 33. University of Massachusetts, Amherst: GLSA.
“Andrea Bonomi”:http://filosofia.dipafilo.unimi.it/~bonomi/index.htm & Alessandro Zucchi: “A Pragmatic Framework for Truth in Fiction”:http://filosofia.dipafilo.unimi.it/~bonomi/BZ240303.pdf
bq. Abstract According to R. Stalnaker, context plays a role in determining the proposition expressed by a sentence by providing the domain of possible worlds that propositions distinguish between: a sentence expresses a proposition by selecting a subset of the set of possible situations given by the context. This is also true for embedded sentences, but these sentences express propositions by selecting subsets out of contexts derived from the basic one. In this paper we propose a semantic analysis of sentences of the form “In fiction x, p” based on this picture of context. We argue that the derived contexts for sentences in the scope of “In fiction x” are determined by three factors: what the beliefs of the author are taken to be, the conventions established for the fiction, and a defeasible presumption of reliability of the narrator. We develop a formal implementation based on the notion of a system of spheres centered on a set of worlds.
Andrea Bonomi: “Fictional Contexts”:http://www.filosofia.unimi.it/~bonomi/trento201102.pdf (to appear in: Selected Papers from the Second Conference on Modeling and Using Contexts, CSLI Publications, Stanford)
Sauerland, Uli and Fabian Heck: “LF-Intervention Effects in Pied-Piping”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/zdmYTBhM
Percus, Orin and Uli Sauerland: “Pronoun Movement in Dream Reports”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jQ0MDc2M
Percus, Orin and Uli Sauerland: “On the LFs of Attitude Reports”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jI4NmJlY
Hulsey, Sarah and Uli Sauerland: “Sorting out Relative Clauses: A Reply to Bhatt”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WU1OGMwM
“Peter Lasersohn”:http://www.linguistics.uiuc.edu/lasersoh/ has posted a short paper “The Temperature Paradox as Evidence for a Presuppositional Analysis of Definite Descriptions”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/TM3MWViZ/. He asks “Does anyone know if this point has been made before? Seems like someone should have said this about 20 years ago …”.
“Chris Kennedy”:http://www.ling.nwu.edu/~kennedy/ has posted “Argument Contained Ellipsis Revisited”:http://www.ling.nwu.edu/~kennedy/Docs/ace-revisited-abs.html
bq. Abstract. [This is Version 1 of an in-progress revision of Kennedy 1994. Comments welcome! ] This paper investigates an unusual identity constraint on English verb phrase ellipsis which imposes the following requirement: when an elliptical relation holds between two verb phrases A and B such that A is contained in an argument b of B, then the corresponding argument a of A must be identical to b. The paper argues that this is due to two factors: 1) the licensing conditions on ellipsis, which require logical equivalence between a deleted constituent and its antecendent (Sag 1976, Williams 1977), and 2) the interpretation of variable binding structures, which involves adding assignments to the assignment function, rather than reassigning values to previously used variables.
bq. “Download a pdf version of this paper”:http://www.ling.nwu.edu/~kennedy/Docs/ace-revisited.pdf.
“Markus Egg”:http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~egg/ (2003): “Beginning novels and finishing hamburgers - remarks on the semantics of ‘to begin’”:http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~egg/Papiere/begin.sub.ps.gz. To appear in Journal of Semantics 20. An earlier version appeared in J. Dölling and T. Zybatow (eds): Ereignisstrukturen. Linguistische Arbeitsberichte 76, Universität Leipzig, 295-319.
bq. Abstract: Verbs like begin may take either a VP or an NP complement, but their meaning is pretty similar in both cases, e.g., for begin, the start of an eventuality is at stake. Pustejovsky’s approach captures this similarity in terms of an invariant meaning of the verb, which entails a process of reinterpretation for the transitive variant of the verb. I will show that while the intuitions of this proposal are on the right track, its actual implementation suffers from a number of shortcomings. I will offer an analysis that preserves Pustejovsky’s intuition but avoids these shortcomings. My analysis is based on an appropriate underspecification formalism.
Note: This paper comes in g-zipped postscript format. Unfortunately, it contains many bitmap fonts. Printing should be fine but to view the postscript file onscreen, I recommend using pkfix on it first, “as described previously”:http://fintel.mit.edu/geek/archives/000077.html.
[via Brian Weatherson’s “Online Papers in Philosophy”:http://philosophypapers.blogspot.com/]
Yoad Winter with Gilad Ben-Avi, Monotonicity and Collective Quantification
bq. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 12:127-151
bq. This paper studies the monotonicity behavior of plural determiners that quantify over collections. Following previous work, we describe the collective interpretation of determiners such as all, some and most using generalized quantifiers of a higher type that are obtained systematically by applying a type shifting operator to the standard meanings of determiners in Generalized Quantifier Theory. Two processes of counting and existential quantification that appear with plural quantifiers are unified into a single determiner fitting operator, which, unlike previous proposals, both captures existential quantification with plural determiners and respects their monotonicity properties. However, some previously unnoticed facts indicate that monotonicity of plural determiners is not always preserved when they apply to collective predicates. We show that the proposed operator describes this behavior correctly, and characterize the monotonicity of the collective determiners it derives. It is proved that determiner fitting always preserves monotonicity properties of determiners in their second argument, but monotonicity in the first argument of a determiner is preserved if and only if it is monotonic in the same direction in the second argument.
The “March 2003 issue of Ratio”:http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/issue.asp?ref=0034-0006&vid=16&iid=1 has three articles of possible interest for semantics:
Attributive Uses of Prosentences by James R. Beebe
Time Travel and Changing the Past: (Or How to Kill Yourself and Live to Tell the Tale) by G. C. Goddu
The Semantics of Rigid Designation by John Justice
The February 2003 issue of “Linguistics and Philosophy”:http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/0165-0157/contents has two articles in it, both very interesting:
“Scare Quotes and Their Relation to Other Semantic Issues”:http://ipsapp008.lwwonline.com/content/getfile/4977/36/2/abstract.htm by Stefano Predelli.
“A Plea For Monsters”:http://ipsapp008.lwwonline.com/content/getfile/4977/36/1/abstract.htm by Philippe Schlenker.
The “February 2003 issue”:http://www3.oup.co.uk/semant/hdb/Volume20/Issue01/ of the “Journal of Semantics”:http://www3.oup.co.uk/semant/ has appeared. It contains three papers:
The Conceptual Inactiveness of Implicit Arguments: Evidence from Particle Verbs and Object Categorization by Holden Härtl. pp. 1-33.
Tense Meanings and Temporal Interpretation by Silvia P. Gennari. pp. 35-71.
Complement Anaphora and Interpretation by Rick Nouwen. pp. 73-113.
“Matthew Stone”:http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~mdstone/ has posted the abstract of a talk he co-authored:
bq. “On-line accented pronoun interpretation in discourse context”:http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~mdstone/pubs/cuny03.pdf by Jennifer J. Venditti, John Trueswell, Matthew Stone and Katherine Nautiyal. Talk presented at CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. MIT, March 2003.
This reminded me that this conference is happening here at MIT in a few weeks. The “conference home page”:http://tedlab.mit.edu/CUNY2003/ says:
bq. The 16th Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference will be held March 27–29, 2003, at MIT in Cambridge, MA, co-organized by Neal Pearlmutter of Northeastern University and Ted Gibson of MIT. The conference will feature papers and posters on theoretical, experimental, and computational research on various aspects of human sentence processing.
Perhaps of particular interest to semantics is a special session on “The Processing and Acquisition of Reference”:http://tedlab.mit.edu/CUNY2003/session.html, which will take place on Friday, March 28.
Subscribe to full news feed