Semantics etc.

The vocal tract and the theory thereof are obviously not my specialty. But I just wanted to point out the discussion about whether the term “blog” carries an air of disreputability, which might make it harder for academics to take this medium seriously. I myself do prefer the term “weblog” usually. I guess “blog” might be reminiscent of “clog” (as in “clogged arteries”) and “blob”, not the most endearing words of the English language.

Anyway, here are some places to look:

• Does “Blog” Have a Disreputable Air? at Invisible Adjunct.
• “Blog Ugly”:http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000624.php at languagehat.
• “Sounding versus Being”:http://www.bisso.com/ujg_archives/000103.html at Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey.
• “Phonaesthetics”:http://www.yarinareth.net/caveatlector/archive/week200212_08.html#e001144 at Caveat Lector.

Geoff Nunberg’s latest Fresh Air piece “Meeting of the Minds”:http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/compromise.html is a riff on the notion that Arabic has no word for “compromise”. I suggested to him that lots of fun was to be had googling for the phrase “has no word for”. Like, apparently German has no word for “humor”. But of course, Geoff was already way ahead of me. I cite from his email:

bq. I did a number of searches on strings of the form “L has no word for,” “no word in L for” and the like. The results were all over the place; I’ll refrain (well almost) from comments:
For L = French, I got hits for the completing words “home,” “ape,” “mind,” “negro,” “kilt,” “noodles,” “doggie bag,” “grub,” “river,” “tacky,” “jockstrap” (really?), “duct tape,” “hangnail,” and “shallow.”
For L = German, “unless,” “humor,” “[the concept of a] team,” “fluffy,” “wife/husband,” “actuary,” “bitch,” “pantaloon,” “fair” (as in “fair play”), “playing,” “convenience,” “humility,” and “bullying.”
For L = Russian, “a/the,” “identity,” “design,” “privacy,” “toe,” “copywriter,” “freedom” and “thirsty.”
For L = Spanish, “boys, fathers,” “flunky,” “heartburn,” “sportsmanship,” “bullfight,” “accountability,” and “compromise”(!).
For L = Chinese, “brand,” “wrist,” “garage sale,” “headhunting,” “word,” privacy,” “improvisation,” “art,” and “yes” (the last cited as a problem for Chinese translators of “Ulysses”)
For L = English, among other things, “a housebreaker who works only by day,” “sabbatical/jubilee” (not native words, the writer says), “Schadenfreude,” “the area between the nose and the upper lip,” “a mother who has lost a child” (Saporta made a point of this one somewhere), “Gemutlichkeit,” the parents of one’s son- or daughter-in-law, “Zukunftsangst,” “ugly beauty,” “informed guess,” “hospitality” (of the sort whose denial can get you in trouble with God), and “a person who sends letter bombs because he is mentally unbalanced and believes that technology is getting out of hand” (I thought we had done that one).

One page I came across adds to this that Guugu Yimithirr (spoken in North Queensland, Australia — I bet it didn’t occur to Geoff to try that one) doesn’t have words like “left” and “right”. I know some people who probably would prefer being speakers of that language. By the way, the page in question is the official “FAQ”:http://www.lsadc.org/web2/faq/faq.htm page of the Linguistic Society of America on the topic of “Does the language I speak influence the way I think?”:http://www.lsadc.org/web2/faq/faqthink.htm.

PS Geoff confirms my suspicion:

bq. No, I didn’t think to try Gugu Yimithirr. Ed Keenan told me once, btw, that the name of that language translates roughly as “this/that sort of talk.” (’Gugu’ is “speech,” and ‘yimi-thirr’, sometimes ‘yimidhir’, is a demonstrative with a comative suffix.) I can imagine the exchange that first attached the name to the language for English-speakers: “So, what do you call that kind of talk?”
Geoff

The “Chronicle of Higher Education”:http://chronicle.com/ has an article on “academic weblogs”:http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i39/39a01401.htm. My blog neighbor “Brian Weatherson”:http://philosophyweblog.blogspot.com/ is mentioned under “From Nascar to Ugly Robes: Some Academic Blogs to Note”.

PS “Kieran Healy”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/, who is also featured in the article, has “some comments”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000439.html.

PPS The Chronicle will host “a live, online discussion”:http://chronicle.com/colloquylive/2003/06/blog/ with “Eugene Volokh”:http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~volokh/, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles and the founder of the “Volokh Conspiracy”:http://volokh.com/, an academic blog, on issues facing scholars who have blogs, on Wednesday, June 4, at 1 p.m., U.S. Eastern time.

Since my course websites are down for the summer, let me note here that I just uploaded a slightly updated version of Chapter 6: Beyond De Re — De Dicto: The Third Reading of the lecture notes on intensional semantics by Irene Heim and myself. This chapter might be useful if (like me) you plan to work out some connections between Kai Wehmeier’s paper “In the Mood”, noted “here”:http://fintel.mit.edu/blog/archives/000233.html a couple of days ago, and some possibly related work in linguistic semantics (and the chapter also contains some pointers to the considerable but disjointed literature).

“Alex Grosu”:http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/lingui/people/grosu.html. “A Unified Theory of ‘Standard’ and ‘Transparent’ Free Relatives”:http://www.ingenta.com/isis/searching/Expand/ingenta?unc=1032193074. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, May 2003, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 247–331.

bq. Abstract: This paper puts forward a unified theory of ’standard’ and ‘transparent’ free relatives, and thus departs from earlier analyses of the latter, which have consistently viewed them as radically different ‘constructions.’ It is argued, partly on the basis of strengthened and refined old arguments and partly on the basis of novel ones, that the two kinds of free relatives are unified by the following core of properties: (i) they are complex XPs, consisting of an overt CP and a null head (with internal structure), (ii) they are multi-categorial, and (iii) their semantic interpretation involves the application of a uniqueness operator to a set obtained by abstraction. The special effects associated with transparent free relatives result from the following combination of factors (which may be encountered separately, in which case they do not induce transparency effects): a) the wh-element in [Spec, CP] binds the subject of a small clause, b) the small clause is of the equative-specificational type, c) abstraction at the CP level applies to an unrestricted property variable, and d) the wh-element is syntactically and semantically underspecified. The cumulative effect of these factors is that the small-clause predicate is perceived as, and in certain ways also functions as, a syntactic and semantic ‘nucleus’ of the complex XP and thus exhibits head-like properties.

Lin, Jo-Wang. “Temporal Reference in Mandarin Chinese”:http://www.ingenta.com/isis/searching/Expand/ingenta?unc=1032155839. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, July 2003, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 259-311.

bq. Abstract: This paper discusses how Chinese, a so-called tenseless language, determines its temporal reference. For simplex sentences without time adverb or aspectual marker, I show that temporal reference is correlated with aktionsart or grammatical viewpoint. For sentences with an aspectual marker, I discuss the temporal semantics of le and guo in detail, showing how their tense/aspectual meanings contribute to temporal reference. I propose to analyze le as an event realization operator and guo as an anteriority operator. For subordinate clauses, I show that temporal reference of complement clauses of verbs is basically determined by verbal semantics of individual verbs, which may impose some temporal restriction on the temporal location of the embedded event. As for relative clauses and temporal adverbial clauses, many different factors such as lexical verbal semantics, referential properties of determiners, lifetime effect of noun phrases, semantic or pragmatics constraints on temporal connectives, inference rules and world knowledge, etc., all interact to help determine temporal reference. Many data discussed in this paper indicate that there is no evidence of (covert) tenses in Chinese. Therefore, challenging work remains for those who have claimed that Tense Phrase is projected in Chinese phrase structures.

Here’s what I know, or rather what I think I know, about semantics jobs this year (in alphabetical order):

• “Ana Arregui”:http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~ana/, finishing at “UMass Amherst”:http://www.umass.edu/linguist/, has accepted a tenure-track offer from the “University of Ottawa”:http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/linguistique/eng/.
• “Bridget Copley”:http://web.mit.edu/copley/www/, recent PhD from “MIT”:http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/, has accepted a 2-year teaching and research post-doc position at “USC”:http://www.usc.edu, joint in linguistics and philosophy.
• Elena Guerzoni, finishing at “MIT”:http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/, has accepted a tenure-track offer from “USC”:http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/linguistics/.
• “Michela Ippolito”:http://www2.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/%7Emichela/, recent PhD from “MIT”:http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/, currently post-doc at “Tübingen”:http://www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/, has accepted a visiting position at “UC Santa Cruz”:http://ling.ucsc.edu/.
• “Luisa Martí”:http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~mmm97002/, who got her degree from “UConn”:http://vm.uconn.edu/~wwwling/index.html in February, 2003, has taken a job as a lecturer in Linguistics at the “University of Witwatersrand”:http://www.wits.ac.za/, in Johannesburg, South Africa.
• “Chris Potts”:http://ling.ucsc.edu/~potts/, finishing at “UC Santa Cruz”:http://ling.ucsc.edu/, has accepted a tenure-track offer from “UMass Amherst”:http://www.umass.edu/linguist/.

If anyone knows more, perhaps you could post a comment, which I will then incorporate in an update of this post. [Thanks to Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Chris Potts for their help.]

“Mark Steedman”:http://www.iccs.informatics.ed.ac.uk/~steedman/home.html. “Information-Structural Semantics for English Intonation”:ftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/steedman/prosody/santabarbara.pdf, University of Edinburgh, Draft 2.2, May 27, 2003.

bq. Selkirk (1984), Hirschberg and Pierrehumbert (1986), Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg (1990), and the present author, have offered different but related accounts of intonation structure in English and some other languages. These accounts share the assumption that the system of tones identified by Pierrehumbert (1980), as modified by Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988) and Silverman et al. (1992), has as transparent and type-driven a semantics in these languages as do their words and phrases. While the semantics of intonation in English concerns information structure and propositional attitude, rather than the predicate-argument relations and operator-scope relations that are familiar from standard semantics in the spirit of the papers collected as Montague 1974, this information-structural semantics is fully compositional, and can be regarded as a component of the same semantic system.

bq. The present paper builds on Steedman (1991) and Steedman (2000a) to develop a new semantics for intonation structure, which shares with the earlier versions the property of being fully integrated into Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG, see Steedman 2000b, hereafter SP). This grammar integrates intonation structure into surface derivational structure and the associated Montague-style compositional semantics, even when the intonation structure departs from the restrictions of traditional surface structure. Many of the diverse discourse meanings that have been attributed to intonational tunes are shown to arise via conversational implicature from more primitive literal meanings distinguished along the three dimensions of information structure, speaker/hearer commitment, and contentiousness.

There is an interesting essay in today’s New York Times by David Berreby, entitled “Fading Species and Dying Tongues: When the Two Part Ways”. The essay is partly in response to an article in the May 15 issue of Nature:

“Parallel extinction risk and global distribution of languages and species”. William J. Sutherland. Nature 423, 276 - 279 (2003)
There are global threats to biodiversity with current extinction rates well above background levels. Although less well publicized, numerous human languages have also become extinct, and others are threatened with extinction. However, estimates of the number of threatened languages vary considerably owing to the wide range of criteria used. For example, languages have been classified as threatened if the number of speakers is less than 100, 500, 1,000, 10,000, 20,000 or 100,000. Here I show, by applying internationally agreed criteria for classifying species extinction risk, that languages are more threatened than birds or mammals. Rare languages are more likely to show evidence of decline than commoner ones. Areas with high language diversity also have high bird and mammal diversity and all three show similar relationships to area, latitude, area of forest and, for languages and birds, maximum altitude. The time of human settlement has little effect on current language diversity. Although similar factors explain the diversity of languages and biodiversity, the factors explaining extinction risk for birds and mammals (high altitude, high human densities and insularity) do not explain the numbers of endangered languages.

In his New York Times essay, Berreby argues essentially that we should not worry too much about the death of many indigenous languages all over the world.

• We should not listen to linguists because their motivations are suspect: “It is no surprise that linguists and activists promote maintaining spoken languages. Just as the Poultry and Egg Council wants us to eat eggs, linguists want languages to study. I wonder, though, where science ends and politics begins.”
• As long as some information about dying languages are preserved, they can be revived if needed: “If the information and political will are present, Ubykh can be revived 500 years from now. Hebrew, after all, was brought back from ancient texts into daily use after 2,000 years.”
• Language regenerates: “It would be a terrible thing to run out of languages. But there is no danger of that, because the reserve of language, unlike the gas tank, is refueled every day, as ordinary people engage in the creative and ingenious act of talking. Old words, constructions and pronunciations drop away, new ones are taken up, and, relentlessly, the language changes.”

I am not myself a linguist working on endangered languages (English and German are not endangered, although my mother’s native language “Plattdeutsch” (Low German) — and in particular her dialect of “Heidscher Platt”, spoken on the Lüneburg Heath — certainly is). But I am mostly convinced by the arguments from endangered language specialists, especially my departed colleague Ken Hale, who was a tireless worker in defense of languages. He once said “As languages disappear, cultures die. The world becomes inherently a less interesting place, but we also sacrifice raw knowledge and the intellectual achievements of millennia.” [Ken’s friends in Australia have put up a page of obituaries.]

It appears to me that the efforts at saving endangered languages go hand in hand with efforts at saving endangered cultures. Berreby seems to want to give the impression that these efforts come from outside “language bullies” who are motivated by suspect political (and financial) reasons. But from what I know about work on indigenous languages, these efforts are fully supported by the indigenous communities and are not the work of “language bullies”.

For many links on endangered languages, see the resource page of the MIT Indigenous Language Initiative. Other good collections: the Teaching Indigenous Languages page at Northern Arizona University and its collection of resources; Randy J. LaPolla’s Handout on Endangered Languages; a page on “The importance of culture, language and identity” on the website of Racism. No Way!, an Australian government project; an article on “Reclaiming Indigenous Languages” on the National Park Service’s Common Ground Online website.

Update For an additional pertinent quote from Ken Hale, see this entry.

François Recanati has posted the latest version of his paper on ‘What is Said’ in M$ Word RTF format:

bq. François Recanati (2002) “What is said and the semantics/pragmatics distinction”:http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/disk0/00/00/03/49/. in Proceedings WOC 2002: Semantics and Pragmatics, Genoa, Italy.

The schedule for the “Brown Workshop on Direct Compositionality”:http://cog.brown.edu:16080/directcomp/ (June 19–21, 2003, Brown University, Providence RI, USA) is “online”:http://cog.brown.edu:16080/directcomp/schedule.html and also “downloadable”:http://cog.brown.edu:16080/directcomp/conf-schedule.pdf.

“Steve Yablo”:http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/home.html just pointed out to me that there is “another Kai”:http://fintel.mit.edu/blog/archives/000031.html in the field.

“Kai Wehmeier”:http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/lps/home/fac-staff/faculty/wehmeier/ is Assistant Professor of Logic & Philosophy of Science at UC Irvine. Looking at Kai’s CV, I see that he grew up near “Münster”:http://www.muenster.de/, which is where I grew up, and that he attended the “University of Münster”:http://www.uni-muenster.de/de/index.html, which is where I spent the first few years of my undergraduate time.

On his homepage, he lists some work that seems of considerable interest to semantics, in particular a paper in progess called “In the Mood”:http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/lps/home/fac-staff/faculty/wehmeier/inthemood.pdf, which deals with the semantic effects of mood-marking, as in sentences like

bq. Under certain circumstances, everyone who is poor would have been rich.

A related three-page abstract appeared in a volume of conference proceedings:

bq. “World Travelling and Mood Swings”:http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/lps/home/fac-staff/faculty/wehmeier/swings.pdf, in: Benedikt Löwe, Thoralf Räsch, and Wolfgang Malzkorn (eds.), Foundations of the Formal Sciences II, Dordrecht: Kluwer (Trends in Logic), 2003.

This all concerns topics I also work on. [Sabine and I even taught “a class”:http://web.mit.edu/24.979/www/ on this a couple of years ago.] As usual, it will take me a while to work through his papers.

“Yoad Winter”:http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~winter/ has posted two new papers:

2003: “Functional Quantification”:http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~winter/papers/fq.pdf. To appear in Research on Language and Computation.

bq. This paper develops a unified analysis of “functional” anaphora and wide-scope indefinites. A new operator is added to Jacobson’s variable-free semantics of functional readings, which leads to an analysis of theses readings using the general Skolem function interpretation of wide-scope indefinites. This accounts for the distributional, technical and intuitive similarities between the two phenomena. Moreover, after formally characterizing the class of generalized quantifiers that are treated by the proposed mechanism, it is argued that this class is a good approximation of the quantifiers that empirically support functional readings.

2003: “On Scope Dominance with Monotone Quantifiers”:http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~winter/papers/sdmon.pdf. With Gilad Ben-Avi. To appear in Proceedings of MOL8.

bq. We characterize pairs of monotone generalized quantifiers Q1 and Q2 that give rise to an entailment relation between their two relative scope construals. This result is used for identifying entailment relations between the two scopal interpretations of simple sentences of the form NP1-V-NP2. The general characterization that we give turns out to cover more examples of such entailments besides the familiar type where the NPs are headed by some and every.

A few weeks ago, there was a flurry of posts in the blogosphere about “the list of winners of the John Bates Clark medal awarded every second year to the outstanding economist under forty”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movabletype/2003archives/001440.html. Brian Weatherson noticed that the list is entirely male (as is the list of Nobel Prize winners in economics) and started a “discussion”:http://philosophyweblog.blogspot.com/20030504philosophyweblogarchive.html about the predominance of males in economics and analytical philosophy. Posts about this are “here”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/000391.html#000391, “here”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000411.html, “here”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/000403.html#000403, “here”:http://mentalspace.ranters.net/quiggin/archives/000991.html, “here”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000415.html, and “here”:http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~osquigle/blog/archives/000153.php. It was noted that cognitive science and linguistics are fields adjacent to analytical philosophy where there is less of a male predominance, although there is still much to do, as Ora Matushansky rightly “points out”:http://mapage.noos.fr/matushan/gender.html. If I had had time at the time, I might have posted something about semantics in particular, where there certainly are many outstanding and powerful women in the community.

Another thing that caught my attention was “this post”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000414.html from Kieran Healy, a sociologist:

bq. I’d Like to Thank the Academy
“Jacob Levy”:http://volokh.blogspot.com/20030504volokharchive.html#200268411 also writes about the Clark medal, and asks whether such awards are worthwhile. I’m not sure. Like Political Science, Sociology has a few awards that are presented at the annual meeting, such as a best book award, a distinguished contribution to scholarship award and a best dissertation award. I can’t in good faith criticize these kinds of awards because, um, I won one last year.
Like Jacob, I think that Political Science and Sociology have too much theoretical and methodological heterogeneity to support an equivalent to the Clark medal. In my more bitter, sour-grapey moods, I sometimes think that Economics is coming it a bit high with both the Clark medal and the Nobel Prize. The former seems like a shameless rip-off of the Mathematician’s Fields Medal and the latter like a shameless rip off of, well, a Nobel Prize. Of course, it ought to go without saying that the recipients of Clark Medals and Nobel Prizes are Very Clever People Indeed. But the presence or absence of the awards themselves says more about the social organization of a discipline than anything else.

Others have remarked on the apparent anomaly of having a Nobel Prize for economics but not for other fields outside physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine. Yves Gingras wrote an interesting “article”:http://www.opendemocracy.net/themes/article-9-665.jsp about the economics Nobel, apropos that movie about John Nash last year. In 1994, James Fallows “wrote”:http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/jfnpr/jf41024.htm in the Atlantic:

bq. By the time it announces next year’s awards, the Nobel committee should either retire the economics prize or offer a whole series of new prizes for other disciplines that use hard tools to study soft subjects. We could have a Nobel prize for sociology and political science. Or a Nobel prize for architecture, which after all applies advanced engineering techniques to express the human spirit. Or perhaps a Nobel prize for psychiatry, which increasingly involves the interaction between chemicals and personality. Perhaps a prize for linguistics, which has produced abstract, mathematically elegant models for the distinguishing human trait of language.

Unfortunately, I was unable to find an online version of a great article by Geoff Pullum on the idea of a Nobel Prize for Linguistics: “Topic … Comment: No Trips to Stockholm”, which appeared in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 1985, 3:2, 265–270, and which I believe is reprinted in his collection The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax.

This all came to mind when I saw what the press office of CUNY “wrote”:http://www.gc.cuny.edu/pressinformation/currentreleases/august2002philosophic.htm about Saul Kripke when he took on a quarter appointment there (as noted earlier today, he has now accepted a full time appointment there):

bq. Recognized as one of the country’s leading philosophers, Saul Kripke began as Visiting Professor in the spring of 2002 and will continue to teach an intensive half-semester course each year. In 2001, he won the Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy, which is given by the Swedish Academy of Sciences and is the equivalent in its field of a Nobel. …

I had never heard of the Schock Prize before. According to the “website”:http://www.kva.se/KVA_Root/eng/awards/international/schock/index.asp of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences:

bq. In his will, Dr. Rolf Schock, who died in 1986, specified that half of his estate should be used to fund four prizes in the fields of logic and philosophy, mathematics, the visual arts and music. It was his wish that the prizes in logic and philosophy and in mathematics should be awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and those in the visual arts and music by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music respectively. Beginning in 1993, prizes are awarded every two years.

The winners of the prize in logic and philosophy have been:

• 1993: W.V. Quine

  For his systematical and penetrating discussions of how learning of language and communication are based on socially available evidence and of the consequences of this for theories on knowledge and linguistic meaning — in paraticular the works “From a Logical Point of View” (1953), “Word and Object” (1960), and “Pursuit of Truth” (1990, 1992)

• 1995: Michael Dummett

  For his penetrating discussion of Frege’s philosophy and for his contributions to the theory of linguistic meaning among them his discussion of how the metaphysical dispute between realism and anti-realism is connected with the meaning-theoretical question of the validity of logical laws.

• 1997: Dana S. Scott

  For his conceptually oriented logical works, especially the creation of domain theory, which has made it possible to extend Tarski’s semantical paradigm to programmering languagesas well as to construct models of Curry’s combinatory logic and Church’s calculus of lambda conversion.

• 1999: John Rawls

  For his book “A Theory of Justice”, which has constituted a renewal of normative ethics and political philosophy and has in an essential way contributed to the methodology for normative ethics.

• 2001: Saul Kripke

  For his creation of the modal-logical semantics that bear his name and for his associated original and profound investigations of identy, reference and necessity.

• 2003: Solomon Feferman

  For his works on the arithmetization of metamathematics, transfinite progressions of theories, and predicativity

Pretty good line-up. It is unclear whether a linguist could break into those ranks, … perhaps a semanticist might have a shot? But at least now the other half of my department has something to aspire to.

Then there is of course also the “Kyoto Prize”:http://www.inamori-f.or.jp/KyotoPrizes/contentse/kpabout.html, which was awarded to Noam Chomsky in 1988 in the “Basic Science” category, with the following rationale:

bq. He proposed “Generative Grammar Theory” marked the beginning of a major revolution in linguistics, in which he provided an ambitious program to explain the structure of the human mind. He has encouraged the formation of cognitive science by giving its basis with his theory.

Anyway, none of these means that any time soon, our hallways will be buzzing with pre-Nobel excitement, which is something that is quite routine in some other departments here at MIT, where it is the odd off-year when none of Nobel Prize winners is connected to the Institute. (According to “this press release”:http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/nobels.html, 1996 was the last such off-year.)

PS I was thrilled to “find out”:http://www.kva.se/KVARoot/eng/news/detail.asp?NewsId=353 that mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter is the recipient of the 2003 Schock Prize in the musical arts. Her “collaboration”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005A46I/102-4332962-8365744 with Elvis Costello is a favorite of mine.

PPS Can you tell the semester is almost over?

[Job Gossip from “The Philosophical Gourmet”:http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/, more precisely their Update E-Mail Service]

bq. Saul Kripke (emeritus, Princeton) has accepted a full-time appointment as Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center (he is currently quarter-time at CUNY). His seminal contributions to modern philosophy include the books Naming and Necessity (Harvard University Press, 1980) and Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Harvard University Press, 1982).

[On William Adams’ page of electronic resources on typography, I found a link to the Online Books Page maintained by John Mark Ockerbloom, where on a lark I entered the keyword “Logic” into the search engine and made an exciting discovery:]

“Studies and Exercises in Formal Logic — Including A Generalization of Logical Processes in Their Application to Complex Inferences” by John Neville Keynes, M.A.. Second Edition Revised and Enlarged. MacMillan and Co. London and New York. 1887. Digitized into pdf-files by the CWRU Preservation Department Digital Library.

John Neville Keynes (1852–1949) was the father of John Maynard Keynes and thus — as Larry Horn has quipped — the grandfather of modern economics. But what makes this find exciting is that his logic textbook contains one of the most extensive discussions of the problem of existential import of natural language quantifiers: Part II, Chapter VIII, “The Existential Import of Categorical Propositions”, pp. 137–160 [The chapter starts with the footnote “It may be advisable for students, on a first reading, to omit this chapter.”]. Here is a direct link to the pdf-file including that chapter.

“Christopher Potts”:http://ling.ucsc.edu/~potts/ is filing his dissertation tomorrow (congratulations!). It is available from his homepage.

Potts, Christopher. 2003. The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. PhD Dissertation. Department of Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz.

bq. Abstract The history of conventional implicatures is rocky, their current status uncertain. I return to Grice’s (1975) original definition with an eye open for novel support. I argue that, even without textbook examples such as therefore and but, conventional implicatures would still be widely attested in natural language. Grice’s definition characterizes a class of speaker-oriented commitments that trace back to individual lexical items and invariably yield semantic multidimensionality. These properties unify the (syntactically diverse) factual domain, which divides fairly easily into two broad classes: (i) supplements, including appositive relatives, nominal appositives, (As)-parentheticals, speaker- and topic-oriented adverbs, and utterance modifiers (chapter 3); and (ii) expressives, including adjectives like damn, the descriptive content of epithets, some kinds of subjunctive voice, and honorification in Japanese (chapter 4). I define a higher-order lambda calculus that provides the tools we need for formalizing Grice’s definition and in turn for modelling the meanings of the expressions in (i)-(ii). The logic, which extends and sharpens the insights of Karttunen and Peters 1979, imbues the label conventional implicature with theoretical content. Though considerable attention is paid to the model-theoretic aspects of the investigation, particularly as they relate to the formal modelling of discourses, much of the dissertation concerns the nature of natural language semantic composition, which we can study independently of a specific class of structures. In the setting of the logic I define, conventional-implicature content is often distinguished solely in the meaning language. Thus, the facts under discussion seem to provide reason to view a representational language for meanings as an essential part of semantic theory. I close by asking what happens when we make slight revisions to Grice’s definition. Removing speaker-orientation results in another rich class of semantically multidimensional constructions, including many that were originally classified as conventional-implicature contributors. I show that the meaning language defined here yields a theory of them as well.

• “2up PDF version”:http://ling.ucsc.edu/~potts/potts-dissertation-2up.pdf (165 pages, approximately 790 KB)
• “2up gzip’d postscript version”:http://ling.ucsc.edu/~potts/potts-dissertation-2up.ps.gz (165 pages, approximately 516 KB)
• “1up PDF version”:http://ling.ucsc.edu/~potts/potts-dissertation-1up.pdf (330 pages, approximately 880 KB)
• “1up gzip’d postscript version”:http://ling.ucsc.edu/~potts/potts-dissertation-1up.ps.gz (330 pages, approximately 506 KB)

As a bonus, he also posts a long abstract (short, preliminary paper) called ‘A layered semantics for utterance modifiers’ (”PDF”:http://ling.ucsc.edu/~potts/potts-brown-abstract.pdf), to be presented at the “Workshop on Direct Compositionality”:http://cog.brown.edu:16080/directcomp/, Brown University, June 19-21, 2003.

bq. In this paper, I use utterance modifiers like frankly and honestly as an excuse to define a layered description logic and a layered class of structures for it. Together, these elements help to bring many formerly metagrammatical (pragmatic) phenomena into the grammar. I hope to develop these basic ideas into a theory of quotation, metalinguistic negation, and perhaps also what James Isaacs and I call hidden imperatives. I also feel near a semantics for textual organizers like firstly and on the other hand, which Geoff Pullum and I plan to discuss in our upcoming talk at FGVienna (the 8th Conference on Formal Grammar).

Our “Epistemic Containment” paper has appeared in LI:

von Fintel, Kai & Iatridou, Sabine: 2003. “Epistemic Containment”:http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/002438903321663370. Linguistic Inquiry. 34:2. 173–198.

bq. Abstract: This article concerns a new constraint on the interaction of quantifier phrases and epistemic modals. It is argued that QPs cannot bind their traces across an epistemic modal, though it is shown that scoping mechanisms of a different nature are permitted to cross epistemic modals. The nature and source of this constraint are investigated.

If you would like an offprint, “here is a pdf-file”:http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/ec.pdf.

PS You might be wondering whether it is OK for me to post a pdf-file of the published version of my own paper. If you actually had doubts, doesn’t that show how messed up scientific publishing has become? But rest assured, the MIT Press has an at least somewhat progressive “copyright agreement for authors”:http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=9842F0B4-3393-4B98-8AFD-7F83B170E181&ttype=4&tid=6&xid=13&xcid=1619. Authors retain the right to “distribute the article for classroom or research purposes in paper or electronic form”. Making an electronic copy available to colleagues who are interested in my work is therefore fine. (I don’t think I should make the offprint available through the Semantics Archive, however, which might constitute giving the paper to a secondary publisher). I would encourage everyone to carefully read the publishing contracts that you sign, to make sure that you retain at least some rights to your own work. Read more about such issues: “Managing Your Copyrights”:http://www.createchange.org/faculty/issues/controlling.html, “Open Access Initiative”:http://www.soros.org/openaccess/help.shtml, Free Online Scholarship (FOS) News, “eprints.org Self Archiving FAQ”:http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/.

Chris Kennedy: “Towards a Grammar of Vagueness”:http://www.ling.nwu.edu/~kennedy/Docs/togramvague-abs.html (Paper presented at the Princeton Workshop on Semantics, May 17, 2003)

bq. This paper investigates the grammatical principles governing the interpretation of a class of vague predicates — gradable adjectives — focusing on the context dependence of the ’standard of comparison’ with respect to which these predicates are judged to be true. I show that the range of variability in interpretation of the standard of comparison is broader than has generally been assumed, specifically that there are distinct types of standards with distinct effects on truth conditions, and I argue that an empirically adequate semantics for such predicates must be able to account for this variability. I then argue that the observed range of interpretations can be explained in terms of the interaction of the scalar properties of gradable predicates and general constraints on semantic economy and strength.

bq. Download a “pdf”:http://www.ling.nwu.edu/~kennedy/Docs/togramvague.pdf version of this paper, or the “handout”:http://www.ling.nwu.edu/~kennedy/Docs/princeton-handout.pdf of my Princeton talk.

[New at the “Semantics Archive”:http://semanticsarchive.net]

Angelika Kratzer: “Indefinites and Functional Heads: From Japanese to Salish”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/mE3ZjAzM/. Slides from an invited talk at SALT 13 (May 10, 2003).

[Note that the files are pdf-files, although they do not have the “.pdf” file extension. If your system does not recognize the file type, just download the files, add the “.pdf” extension to the name, and feed them to Acrobat.]