A weblog on semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and intersections thereof
“From Uzbek to Klingon, the Machine Cracks the Code”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/31/technology/circuits/31next.html?ex=1374984000&en=78fda6fa8aa7352d&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
bq. As computers get more powerful, they’re getting better at learning languages on their own.
Zoltan Szabo. “On Qualification”:http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/zs15/Qualification.pdf. Added 30 July 2003 - Comments welcomed.
bq. This is a draft of a paper on the semantics of as-phrases. I argue that sentences like ‘John as a judge earns (exactly) $50,000′ involve two-layered predication where the qualified predicate (here: ‘earns (exactly) $50,000′) is ascribed to the subject insofar as the qualifying predicate (here: ‘judge’) is. Predication “under a description” is given a semantics within a neo-Davidsonean framework. I also argue that the analysis can shed light on the way qualification is used in discussing questions of sameness and difference in metaphysics.
Nicholas Asher & Linton Wang (2003), “Unspecification, Ambiguity, and Anaphora with Plurals”:http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/philosophy/faculty/asher/papers/salt-superfinal3.pdf, Semantics and Linguistic Theory 13 (SALT 13), University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, May, 2003.
bq. Abstract We provide examples of plurals related to ambiguity and anaphora that pose problems or are counterexamples for current approaches to plurals. We then propose a dynamic semantics based on an extension of dynamic predicate logic (DPL+) to handle these examples. On our theory, different readings of sentences or discourses containing plurals don’t arise from a postulated ambiguity of plural terms or predicates applying to plural DPs, but follow rather from different types of dynamic transitions that manipulate inputs and outputs from formulas or discourse constituents. Many aspects of meaning can affect the type dynamic transitions: the lexical semantics of predicates to the left and right of a transition, and number features of DPs and discourse constraints like parallelism.
Mark Steedman. “Scope Alternation and the Syntax-Semantics Interface”:ftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/steedman/quantifiers/journal3.pdf, (2003), Draft 3.1, July 2003, for comments. (This paper replaces an unpublished version circulated under the earlier title “Syntactic Constraints on Quantifier Scope Alternation”)
bq. Abstract Ambiguities arising from alternations of scope in interpretations for multiply quantified sentences have led to proposals for quantifier movement at logical form, equivalent abstraction or storage mechanisms, scope underspecification, or proliferating type-changing operations. Such devices compromise the strong assumptions of syntactic/semantic transparency and monotonicity underlying the Frege-Montague approach to the theory of grammar. The paper examines some interactions of scope alternation with syntactic phenomena including coordination, binding, and word-order and information structure in English, Dutch, and German. Starting from the assumption that many expressions that have been treated as generalized quantifiers are in fact referential expressions, and using Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) as a framework, the paper presents an account of quantifier scope ambiguities in which all and only the available readings follow directly from the combinatorics of surface syntactic derivation.
[New at the “Semantics Archive”:http://semanticsarchive.net/]
Stefan Kaufmann. “Conditional predictions — A probabilistic account”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/WQxNGI4O/
bq. Abstract The connection between the probabilities of conditionals and the corresponding conditional probabilities has long been explored in the philosophical literature, but its implementation faces both technical obstacles and objections on empirical grounds. In this paper I first outline the motivation for the probabilistic turn and Lewis’ triviality results, which stand in the way of what would seem to be its most straightforward implementation. I then focus on Richard Jeffrey’s ‘randomvariable’ approach, which circumvents these problems by giving up the notion that conditionals denote propositions in the usual sense. Even so, however, the randomvariable approach makes counterintuitive predictions in simple cases of embedded conditionals. I propose to address this problem by enriching the model with an explicit representation of causal dependencies. The addition of such causal information not only remedies the shortcomings of Jeffrey’s conditional, but also opens up the possibility of a unified probabilistic account of indicative and counterfactuals conditionals.
Technical Note: there is a pdf-file and a ps-file available at the Archive. The pdf-file suffers from the “fuzzy font problem”. I made myself a nicer unfuzzy pdf-version from the ps-file, as outlined in “my geek note on the problem”:http://fintel.mit.edu/geek/archives/000077.html.
[New at “Semantics Archive”:http://semanticsarchive.net/]
Uli Sauerland. “A new semantics for number”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/TM0YjdiO. Paper from SALT 13.
bq. Conclusion. My main claim in this paper was that the treatment of plurality requires a presuppositional account of agreement. I have shown in Section 2 that such presuppositional account is necessary for coordinations and pronouns. In Section 3, I have shown that my account also is the only one that can explain the number marking on definite descriptions. These two arguments are then the arguments for my claim. I hope to have shown in section 4 through 7 that the semantic licensing account of agreement raises interesting semantic questions about the interaction of presuppositions and implicatures. In particular, the facts with indefinites in section 5 are still puzzling to me.
Mark Greenberg and Gilbert Harman, “Conceptual Role Semantics”:http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/CRS.pdf, draft for The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, to be edited by Ernest Lepore and Barry Smith. Comments invited.
bq. Conceptual role semantics (CRS) is the view that the most important aspects of the meanings of expressions of a language or other symbol system are determined and explained by the way expressions in that language or system are used in thinking. The theory can be taken to be applicable to language in the ordinary sense, to mental representations, conceived of as part of a “language of thought”, or to certain other sorts of symbol systems. CRS rejects the competing idea that thoughts have intrinsic content that is prior to the use of concepts in thought. According to CRS, meaning and content derive from use, not the other way round.
An article in the New York Times today, which mentions the Amerind Hypothesis and some possibly relevant genetic data: “New World Ancestors Lose 12,000 Years”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/25/science/25HUMA.html?ex=1374465600&en=ae50be54b8b612ed&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND.
bq. Scientists have found genetic evidence that the first human migrations to the New World from Siberia probably occurred no earlier than 18,000 years ago.
[via “APA’s Philosophy in the News”:http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/philnews/]
bq. “Philosophy Talk”, a public radio show created and hosted by John Perry and Ken Taylor, will pilot on KALW at 1 p.m. (pacific time) on Wednesday, August 20th, 2003. The show is live-streamed on the internet at “http://www.kalw.org/”:http://www.kalw.org/, so APA members outside the broadcast area can hear it. “Philosophy Talk” will begin weekly broadcasts in January 2004. Members interested in having the program broadcast on their university or local public radio stations can contact Ken Taylor at the Stanford Philosophy Department taylor@turing.stanford.edu. The Pacific Division of the APA has provided a small amount of monetary support for “Philosophy Talk”.
Update More on the show from the “Stanford Report”:http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2003/august6/philtalk-86.html. The “homepage”:http://www.stanford.edu/philosophytalk/ of the show will contain an audio archive. [Thanks to “Brian Weatherson”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002086.html]
“Graeme Forbes”:http://www.tulane.edu/~forbes/. Verbs of Creation and Depiction: More Events in the Semantics of English (Draft 6, July 2003)
bq. This paper is descended from one written for a symposium on the work of Terence Parsons (Notre Dame University, 7th to 8th February 2003). Creation verbs (’build’, ‘construct’, ‘assemble’ etc.) and depiction verbs (’sketch’, ‘draw’, ’sculpt’, ‘imagine’ etc.) have certain affinities, and my solution to the unfinished-object problem for creation verbs in the progressive deploys a treatment of intensional transitives I have proposed elsewhere. This turns out to have consequences (hitherto unnoticed, at least by me) for the semantics of notional readings of depiction-verb phrases. The paper ends with a theory about why depiction verbs betray a definiteness effect in DP syntactic complements (”Verrocchio painted two/many/no angels” have notional readings, “Verrocchio painted the two/most/all angels” don’t).
This paper is about a puzzling aspect of the behavior of depiction verbs (’sketch’, ‘draw’, ’sculpt’, ‘imagine’ etc.). Most groups of intensional transitive verbs form verb phrases with quantified noun phrases in a way that permits a notional reading of the verb phrase, regardless of the quantificational determiner in the noun phrase. For example, “Perseus seeks exactly one gorgon”, “Perseus seeks another gorgon”, and “Perseus seeks every gorgon” can all be understood notionally (the coda “but no particular gorgon(s)” makes sense in each case). But if we change “seeks” to “drew”, the notional reading with “every gorgon” disappears. Similarly with “most gorgons”, “the gorgon” and “both gorgons”. I offer an account of why this happens in terms of Keenan’s classification of determiners vis à vis the definiteness effect.
This short paper (3060 words exc. notes and bibliography) is excerpted from an earlier draft of “Verbs of Creation and Depiction”.
A future version of this paper should appear in Facta Philosophica in 2003. This draft addresses some problems about intensional transitives raised by Moltmann and Zimmerman, and corrects some mistakes in my paper in The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (S.V. for 2002). Like that paper, its main concern is with the conjunctive force of disjunctive NP complements of intensional transitive verbs: “Smith needs a good lawyer or a friendly judge” on its normal reading implies both “a good lawyer could help him” AND “a friendly judge could help him”. The reading on which “Smith needs a good lawyer or a friendly judge” is implied by “Smith needs a good lawyer” alone is much less preferred.
“Petra Hendriks”:http://odur.let.rug.nl/~hendriks/engels.htm has posted two new papers:
“Ambiguous and: Coherence and contrast in coordination”:http://odur.let.rug.nl/~hendriks/contrast03.pdf. First draft July 2003. Unpublished manuscript, University of Groningen.
bq. Abstract. It has been observed (Kehler, 1996, 2000, 2002) that ellipsis resolution processes interact with the inference processes underlying the establishment of coherence relations in discourse. For example, gapping only cooccurs with the coherence relation of Resemblance. In this paper I show that the reason why certain ellipsis processes only cooccur with certain types of coherence relations does not lie in the possibility to reconstruct the missing material. Rather, ellipsis processes differ in their relation to the topic of the sentence. Because coherence relations are argued to differ in the way they construct the topic (i.e., as a contrastive or non-contrastive topic), coherence relations pose restrictions on the types of ellipsis they can cooccur with. This conclusion is supported by observed differences between gapping and subject deletion in Dutch SGF-constructions.
“A New Hypothesis on Compositionality”:http://odur.let.rug.nl/~hendriks/sydney03.pdf (with Reinhard Blutner and Helen de Hoop). In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cognitive Science, Sydney, Australia, July 13-17, 2003.
bq. Abstract. In this paper we put forward a new hypothesis on compositionality of meaning, namely that compositionality is bidirectional optimization. Underspecification approaches to natural language interpretation generally start with an underspecified or weak meaning, which is strengthened by contextual information. In contrast, the bidirectional optimization approach we advocate proceeds from the strongest possible meaning. This meaning can be changed or weakened by contextual information. Under this approach, the meaning of an utterance is composed in a functional rather than a concatenative way. Hence, this approach avoids a number of well-known empirical problems associated with concatenative compositionality.
[previously “noted”:http://fintel.mit.edu/blog/archives/000267.html in this weblog]
[New at “Semantics Archive”:http://semanticsarchive.net/]
Maribel Romero & Chung-hye Han. “On Negative Yes/No Questions”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/mQ0MzJmY. Submitted to Linguistics & Philosophy. University of Pennsylvania and Simon Fraser University. Revised version of 2002 draft.
bq. Abstract. Preposed negation yes/no (yn)-questions like Doesn’t John drink? necessarily carry the implicature that the speaker thinks John drinks, whereas non-preposed negation yn-questions like Does John not drink? do not necessarily trigger this implicature. Furthermore, preposed negation yn-questions have a reading “double-checking” p and a reading “double-checking” not p, as in Isn’t Jane coming too? and in Isn’t Jane coming either? respectively. We present other yn-questions that raise parallel implicatures and argue that, in all the cases, the presence of an epistemic conversational operator VERUM derives the existence and content of the implicature as well as the p/not p-ambiguity.
“Philippe Schlenker”:http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schlenker/. Context of Thought and Context of Utterance (A Note on Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present), to appear with minor revisions in Mind & Language. (last modified: July 17th, 2003)
bq. Abstract: Based on the analysis of narrations in Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present, we argue (building in particular on Banfield 1982 and Doron 1991) that the grammatical notion of context of speech should be ramified into a Context of Thought and a Context of Utterance. Tense and person depend on the Context of Utterance, while all other indexicals (including here, now and the demonstratives) are evaluated with respect to the Context of Thought. Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present are analyzed as special combinatorial possibilities that arise when the two contexts are distinct, and exactly one of them is presented as identical to the physical point at which the sentence is articulated.
All the papers that appear in the book Perfect Explorations, edited by Artemis Alexiadou, Monika Rathert, and Arnim von Stechow are “downloadable”:http://www2.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~monika/perfex/perfex.html in preprint versions.
An article about the origins of language in today’s Science Times: “Early Voices: The Leap to Language “:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/science/15LANG.html?ei=5007&en=551abe8df15d518c&ex=1373601600&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=all
Well, mostly, nothing. After a health scare, I’m trying to make sure that I get plenty of exercise, eat healthy food, and do not get stressed out about stuff. This mind set combines with a natural tendency towards procrastination to guarantee that no substantive work gets done (although I have been slowly catching up on my rather huge email backlog).
Having said that, I will be an invited speaker at a workshop on Conditional and Unconditional Modality, which will be part of “ESSLLI 2003″:http://www.logic.at/esslli03/, which will be held in Vienna in August.
I will probably be talking about epistemic modality, evidentials, and conditionals. But what I will say is very unclear to me as of now. I guess I actually do need to do some work soon.
Also, my co-author Sabine Iatridou and I are brainstorming about some interesting sets of examples and as soon as we figure out what they are examples of, we’ll probably start writing our next joint paper.
Later in the fall, I will give a colloquium talk at UMass. And in May next year, I will be an invited speaker at SALT.
My next teaching engagement will be the pragmatics course in the fall, the advanced semantics course in the spring, and also in the spring a joint seminar on modality with Sabine.
[new at “ingenta”:http://www.ingenta.com/isis/searching/Expand/ingenta?unc=1032671709]
Rajesh Bhatt. “Locality in Correlatives”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, August 2003, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 485-541(57).
bq. Abstract: Correlativization seems to be an intrinsically non-local strategy, where the Correlative clause can appear discontinuous from the noun phrase it modifies. I show that correlative constructions in the Modern Indo-Aryan languages nevertheless display locality effects. The nature of these locality effects depends upon whether the correlative clause involves a single relativization (Simple') or mutiple relativizations (Multi-Head’). The generalization that emerges is that a Correlative clause must be merged as locally as possible to the phrase that it modifies. Simple correlatives modify DPs and so they start adjoined to the DP that they modify and then are fronted to an IP-adjoined position. Such an approach is able to explain the hitherto unexplained sensitivity of the correlative-modified phrase relationship to islands. Multi-Head Correlatives modify IPs and therefore they start adjoined to the smallest IP that contains the variables bound by the Multi-Head Correlative, followed by optional movement to the clause-initial position. My proposal argues that Simple Correlatives and Multi-Head Correlatives involve different derivational histories. This difference in derivational history is then used to account for the many differences in their syntactic behavior. Finally, the `Condition on Local Merge’ from which this analysis follows is shown to have cross-linguistic support.
“Zoltán Gendler Szabó”:http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/zs15/. “Descriptions without Uniqueness — A Reply to Abbott”:http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/zs15/Abbott.pdf
bq. This is a rejoinder to Barbara Abbott, whose reply to my paper ‘Descriptions and Uniqueness’ (Philosophical Studies (2000) 101 : 29 – 57) will appear in Philosophical Studies along with this rejoinder. In the original paper, I argued that singular indefinite and definite descriptions make the same truth-conditional contribution to sentences in which they occur in extensional contexts.
[Thanks to “Brian Weatherson”:http://philosophyweblog.blogspot.com/ for the link to Zoltan’s new homepage]
“Zoltán Gendler Szabó”:http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/zs15/. “On the Progressive and the Perfective”:http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/zs15/Progressive.pdf.
bq. This is a paper about the semantics of the progressive and the perfective. The key thesis is that even though the project of trying to analyze the former in terms of the latter fails, the reverse analysis can succeed. This paper is forthcoming in Noûs.
[Thanks to “Brian Weatherson”:http://philosophyweblog.blogspot.com/ for the link to Zoltan’s new homepage]
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