A weblog on semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and intersections thereof
While I was poking around, I found the webpage for the “USC Workshop on the Linguistics/Philosophy Interface: The Nature and Structure of States and Events, 14-16 February 2003″:http://www.uscphilosophy.org/philo/conferences/feb2003.cfm. It contains links to the five main papers given at the conference:
[via “The Philosophical Gourmet”:http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/, more precisely their Update E-Mail Service]
bq. Anthony Gillies (epistemology, decision theory, philosophy of language), currently tenure-track at the University of Texas at Austin, has accepted a tenure-track offer from Harvard University. Gillies earned his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona.
That’s good news for the Metro Boston language science community. I met “Thony”:http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/philosophy/faculty/gillies/ a while back when he sat in on a course on conditionals I taught at ESSLI 1999. We met again when I came to Tucson for a colloquium talk. I look forward to him being in Cambridge. (He also likes soccer!)
In linguistics, we have nothing like the Philosophical Gourmet. There is not even an (un)official job gossip service. I myself am spectacularly out of the loop on such matters. Here’s what I know, or rather what I think I know, about semantics jobs this year (in alphabetical order):
If anyone knows more, perhaps you could post a comment, which I will then incorporate in an update of this post.
Ernie LePore has posted a couple of new papers (in M$ Word format):
“An Abuse Context in Semantics: The Case of Incomplete Definite Descriptions”:http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/lepore/incomplete-final.doc (2003). in Descriptions and Beyond: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays on Definite and Indefinite Descriptions and Other Related Phenomena, eds. Anne Bezuidenhout and Marga Reimer., Oxford University Press.
“Unarticulated Constituents and Hidden Indexicals: An Abuse of Context in Semantics”:http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/lepore/UnarticulatedConstituents.doc (with Herman Cappelen)(2003). in Essays in Honor of John Perry, eds. M. O’Rourke and C. Washington, MIT Press.
I just came across this paper in a recent issue of the Journal of Pragmatics:
“Harumi Moore”:http://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/japanese/hmoore.html, Japanese ka-indefinites and the semantic domain of unknown to the speaker, Journal of Pragmatics, Volume 35, Issue 4, April 2003, Pages 589-614. Abstract.
bq. “What are the functions of the indefinite noun in Japanese, a language that does not obligatorily mark indefinite noun phrases? Through comparison with English indefinite expressions, this paper clarifies the semantics of the Japanese ka-indefinite in the light the semantic division known vs. unknown to the speaker (Haspelmath, Martin, 1997. Indefinite Pronouns. Oxford University Press, Oxford), a division which has received little attention in semantic research so far. This paper argues that rather than indefiniteness, the ka-indefinite expresses the speaker`s lack of knowledge of the identity of the referent.”
The topic of indefinites with some kind of modal meaning has been one I have been fascinated with for a while. In my dissertation work, I got frustrated by the contrast between A blue-eyed bear is usually intelligent and Some blue-eyed bear is usually intelligent. I never really knew what to make of the difference between a and some. A little later I came across an interesting discussion in a mostly neglected book by Strawson (Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar, 1974, Methuen, pp. 110/111):
bq. “Consider the following cases:
bq. 1. A policeman has been shot
2. Some {general/cabinet minister/VIP} has been shot
3. I’ve been stung by some insect
4. I’ve been stung by a wasp
5. I’ve been stung by some wasp
6. She has just been delivered of a boy
7. She has just been delivered of some boy
bq. Now what is the difference between the cases in which we use a and the cases in which we use some? My suggestion is that the choice of some rather than a embodies what might be called an acknowledgment or recognition of the fact that the identification supplied, though perhaps the best the speaker can do, might be regarded as inadequate to the circumstances of the case; and that the kind of identification which the choice of some rather than a indicates or suggests inability to provide (though perhaps sometimes accompanied by indifference to or unconcern about) may be either further kind-identification or individual-identification. If this is on the right lines, it would explain some facts about my examples. Thus there is more likely in general to be an individual identification question asked in the case of a cabinet minister (general, V.I.P.) than in the case of a policeman; and more point, therefore, in acknowledging the question, as it were, while disclaiming the ability to answer it. In my next group of three examples, the most satisfactory description of an unsatisfactory situation is given by I’ve been stung by a wasp. That gives all the identification we need of what stung me. I’ve been stung by some insect acknowledges that the kind-identification given falls short of what we generally regard as desirable in such cases (from the point of view, for example, of treatment), even though it may be spoken in a spirit of manly indifference to such concern. I’ve been stung by some wasp, on the other hand, with its suggestion of a possible individual-identification of the wasp in question seems absurd. Even more absurd is the suggestion of a possible individual-identification in the case of She has just been delivered of some boy. It is not totally absurd, any more than the question, Who is the boy she has just been delivered of? is totally absurd; but it would require an elaborate setting to be given any natural use at all.”
For years, I have been giving this long quotation to audiences, trying to inspire some work on this topic. See for example the “lecture notes of a course I taught in Prague”:http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/qic.pdf and some “notes from an MIT semantics seminar in 1999″:http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/whatever.notes.pdf, which primarily deal with whatever.
There is now an interesting body of work on what Alonso-Ovalle & Menéndez-Benito call “epistemic indefinites” and related expressions. Here are some recent references:
bq. Becker, Misha (1999) The ‘Some’ Indefinites, paper presented at Colloque de Syntaxe et Semantique à Paris, October 1997. In G. Storto (ed.) Syntax at Sunset 2, UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics vol. 3.
bq. Kai von Fintel (2000) “Whatever”:http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/whatever.pdf. Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 10.
bq. Angelika Kratzer and Junko Shimoyama (2002) “Indeterminate Pronouns: The View from Japanese”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WEwNjc4Z/. In Y. Otsu, editor, The Proceedings of the Third Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics. Hituzi Syobo, Tokyo, pp. 1-25.
bq. “Luis Alonso-Ovalle”:http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~luisalo/ and Paula Menéndez-Benito (2003): Some Epistemic Indefinites. To appear in Makoto Kadowaki and Shigeto Kawahara (eds.), Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society 33. University of Massachusetts, Amherst: GLSA.
This topic is one of the ones I plan to explore in the Spring 2004 Topics in Semantics seminar I will be co-teaching with Sabine Iatridou.
Donka Farkas and Henriëtte de Swart (to appear, 2003). “The semantics of incorporation: from argument structure to discourse transparency”:http://www.let.uu.nl/~Henriette.deSwart/personal/Farkas+DeSwart.htm. Stanford: CSLI publications. Individual pdf-files for 7 chapters are made available:
“Christopher Potts”:http://ling.ucsc.edu/~potts/. “Conventional implicatures, a distinguished class of meanings”:http://ling.ucsc.edu/~potts/potts-cis-interfaces.pdf. To appear in Gillian Ramchand and Charles Reiss, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
bq. Abstract I return to Grice’s original definition of conventional implicature and argue that it picks out a theoretically important and widely attested class of meanings. I focus on nominal appositives like Lance, a cyclist, arguing that the propositions they express are best classified as conventional implicatures. I imbue this classification with theoretical content by developing a multidimensional meaning language that is suited to describing constructions with the properties specified in Grice’s definition. I illustrate with an analysis of nominal appositives that locates their special semantic properties in their characteristic comma intonation.
Apropos the Hornstein-Pietroski work on quantifier scope ambiguities mentioned earlier, there is also a draft paper by “Mark Steedman”:http://www.informatics.ed.ac.uk/~steedman/
bq. “Scope Alternation and the Syntax-Semantics Interface” (2003), Draft 3.0, April 2003, for comments. (PostScript)(PDF)
PS Actually, the linked files are not (yet) on the ftp-server. What’s there are “ps”:ftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/steedman/quantifiers/journal3.ps.gz and “pdf”:ftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/steedman/quantifiers/journal2.pdf versions of an earlier draft (2.2, December 2002).
“Arnim von Stechow”:http://vivaldi.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~arnim10/ has posted a revised version of his paper on seit and the Perfect in German.
bq. This version contains a revised version of the section “Perfect of Result”. The former, and in fact printed version, contained some typos and the theory of result modification did not work, a fact discovered by Daniel Büring. I have been trying to overcome the shortcomings. (April 9, 2003).
“Paul Pietroski”:http://www.wam.umd.edu/~pietro/ lists among his “papers”:http://www.wam.umd.edu/~pietro/research/papers/index.htm the following:
bq. Function and Concatenation (in Logical Form, edited by G. Preyer and G. Peters, OUP 2002).
Explores the idea that concatenating natural language expressions corresponds to predicate-conjunction, as opposed to function-application. The proposal is developed in more detail in Events and Semantic Architecture (forthcoming, OUP). But the paper gives the main idea, in the context of questions about how natural language syntax is related to Logical Form.
bq. Monadic Determiners: Quantification and Thematic Separation DRAFT: January, 2003
This draft of a (long) paper, a kind of companion piece to “Function and Concatenation,” provides an account of quantification in natural language based on the idea that determiners (like ‘every’, ’some’, ‘most’, etc.) aresemantically monadic predicates. A detailed outline of the paper is available. But the basic idea is this: if we treat transitive action verbs as predicates of events, we can think of events as special cases of “things with participants;” and we can treat determiners as predicates of such things, without saying that determiners are satisfied by (pairs of) plural entities, given the right understanding of second-order logic. The paper draws heavily on George Boolos’ work.
bq. The Character of Natural Language Semantics
(to appear in Epistemology of Language, edited by Alex Barber, OUP). Argues against the idea that a compositional semantics for a natural language will have theorems that specify the truth-conditions of sentences (relative to contexts). Typically, sentences don’t have truth-conditions, not even relative to (theoretically tractable) contexts. And typically, the truth-conditions of utterances are not compositionally determined. Truth conditions often depend on theoretically intractable aspects of conversational situations. So the meaning of a sentence isn’t a function from contexts to truth-conditions. Linguistic meanings are, as Chomsky has long urged, more “internal” than many philosophers think.
bq. Does Every Sentence Like This Exhibit A Scope Ambiguity? coauthored with Norbert Hornstein
(in Belief and Meaning, edited by W. Hinzen and H. Rott, Hansel-Hohenhausen 2002)
The answer is ‘no’. Instances of ‘every F likes some G’ may not, after all, be examples of scope ambiguity. Figuring out whether a given expression with multiple quantifiers is semantically ambiguous is hard.
The final program (with times etc.) for Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 13 has been posted: “html”:http://depts.washington.edu/salt13/program.html, “pdf”:http://depts.washington.edu/salt13/program.pdf. The conference is May 9-11, 2003 at the University of Washington, Seattle. Looks good.
The indefatigable “Robert van Rooy”:http://turing.wins.uva.nl/~vanrooy/ has posted two new papers:
“A modal analysis of modal subordination”:http://turing.wins.uva.nl/~vanrooy/JoS03.pdf
bq. In this paper I give a modal two-dimensional analysis of presupposition and modal subordination. I will think of presupposition as a non-veridical propositional attitude. This allows me to evaluate what is presupposed and what is asserted at different dimensions without getting into the binding problem. What is presupposed will be represented by an accessibility relation between possible worlds. The major part of the paper consists of a proposal to account for the dependence of the interpretation of modal expressions, i.e. modal subordination, in terms of an accessibility relation as well. Moreover, I show how such an analysis can be extended from the propositional to the predicate logical level.
“Negative Polarity Items in Questions: Strength as Relevance”:http://turing.wins.uva.nl/~vanrooy/NPIQuest-n.pdf
bq. The traditional approach towards (negative) polarity items is to answer the question in which contexts NPIs are licensed. The inspiring approaches of Kadmon & Landman (1990, 1993) (K&L) and Krifka (1990, 1992, 1995) go a major step further: they also seek to answer the question of why these contexts license NPIs. To explain the appropriate use of polarity items in questions, however, we need to answer an even more challenging question: why is an NPI used in a particular utterance in the first place? K&L and Krifka go some way to answer this question as well, but I seek to give the question a somewhat ‘deeper’ explanation.
“Arnim von Stechow”:http://vivaldi.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~arnim10/ has posted the final version of his NELS talk “Feature Deletion under Semantic Binding: Tense, Person, and Mood under Verbal Quantifiers”:http://vivaldi.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~arnim10/Aufsaetze/vonstech.pdf.
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