Semantics etc.

Jason Stanley. “On the Linguistic Basis for Contextualism”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jasoncs/LingContext.pdf. Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.

Four forthcoming papers by Robyn Carston:

• (with Diane Blakemore) The pragmatics of sentential coordination with ‘and’. Lingua.
• “Truth-conditional content and conversational implicature”:http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/robyn/pdf/woc.pdf. In: C. Bianchi (ed.) The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction. CSLI Publications.
• Review of Stephen C. Levinson Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Journal of Linguistics.
• “Relevance theory and the saying/implicating distinction”:http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/robyn/pdf/relsayimplic.pdf. In: L. Horn & G. Ward (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Note Some of this may well end up on the reading list for my pragmatics course.

Bart Geurts. 2003: “Existential Import”:http://www.kun.nl/phil/tfl/bart/papers/eximport.pdf. To appear in: E. Comorovski and K. von Heusinger (eds.), Existence: Syntax and Semantics. Kluwer, Dordrecht.

Note This looks like it is quite relevant to some of the concerns in my paper on The King of France. While my paper is yet to appear (but I hear from the editors that things are moving along), it is now years old and I am tempted to revisit the topic soon (I know have a pile of emailed comments to meditate over — including quite a few from Steve Yablo).

Before we leave for Vienna, I finally managed to put some initial course info together for my fall course on pragmatics. The website is “here”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics. There is a draft “syllabus”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/syllabus.pdf and an “RSS feed”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/pragmatics.rss.

A draft version of the syllabus for this semester’s incarnation of this course is now available.

This is the course website for this fall’s incarnation of course 24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory. The first class meeting is on September 4. See you then.

Hop on over to Brian Weatherson’s “Thoughts Arguments and Rants”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002087.html to read about a puzzle with epistemic might that Brian, Andy Egan, and John Hawthorne are doing a paper on.

“Techdirt”:http://techdirt.com/articles/20030821/024217.shtml links to articles listing some of the new words in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, published today. Here are some samples:

• bada bing (think Sopranos)
• muggle (think Harry Potter)
• cyberslacker
• egosurf
• blog
• prairie-dogging (apparently, a term describing workers in cubicles who raise their heads above the partitions surrounding their desks to see what is going on)

“David Beaver”:http://www.stanford.edu/~dib/ and Cleo Condoravdi. A Uniform Analysis of Before and After, to appear. In Rob Young and Yuping Zhou (eds), Proceedings of SALT XIII, CLC Publications, Cornell.

bq. From the Conclusion:We have proposed a uniform account of before and after sentences that is consistent with their differences with respect to inferential properties, NPI licensing and veridicality.

For those of us who like to write and want to write better, the “BBC News Styleguide”:http://www.bbctraining.co.uk/pdfs/newsStyleGuide.pdf might be fun to look at. [via “charleshartman.org”:http://www.charleshartman.org/mt/archives/2003/08/20/bbcnewsstyleguide.html]

Early on, there are some examples of unintended ambiguities, which could be used in intro semantics to illustrate scope.

bq. The first rule of writing is to know what you want to say. This may seem a statement of the obvious, but items are often broadcast which are not exactly what the writer intended:
For the second time in six months, a prisoner at Durham jail has died after hanging himself in his cell.
The ability of some people to die more than once is also illustrated in this headline:
A suicide bomber has struck again in Jerusalem.

Petra Hendriks. “Coherence Relations, Ellipsis, and Contrastive Topics”:http://odur.let.rug.nl/~hendriks/contrast03.pdf. Second draft August 19, 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 (im)possibility to reconstruct the missing material. Rather, ellipsis processes differ in their relation to the topic of the sentence. The way in which different coherence relations construct their topic (i.e., as a contrastive topic or as a noncontrastive topic) restricts the types of ellipsis they can occur with. This conclusion is supported by observed differences between gapping and subject deletion in Dutch SGF-constructions.

Veneeta Dayal. Multiple Wh Questions. (SynCom #66) to appear in M. Everaert and H. van Riemsdijk (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, 2003.

Geoff Nunberg’s latest Fresh Air piece “Postmodern like a Fox”:http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg//fox.html deals with the battle over the slogan “Fair and Balanced”.

Jay Keyser in his moving obituary for Ken Hale, which just appeared in Language, cites a passage by Ken that I had been looking for when I wrote my entry on language diversity.

I will assume without further discussion that the purpose of humanity is to exercise to the greatest possible degree the intellectual powers which define its distinctive biological heritage, through the mental and material creation of the widest possible range of cultural products. And I will assume further, all things being equal, that anything that enhances this purpose is moral, and that anything that obstructs it is immoral. A number of things follow immediately from this. Thus, for example, the oppression of human groups and individuals violates the human purpose. And assuming that both breadth and depth are necessary to achieving the human purpose, its enabling condition is linguistic and cultural diversity. Only with diversity can it be guaranteed that all avenues of human intellectual progress will be traveled. From this it follows that local languages and cultures must be permitted to develop in accordance with the directions of progress which the communities involved define for themselves.

[Ken Hale, cited from Henry Rosemont’s book A Chinese mirror (La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 1991, p. 95), via Keyser’s obituary]

“Geoff Nunberg”:http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/’s newest: “The Defanging of a Radical Epithet”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/17/weekinreview/17NUNB.html on the label “leftist”.

“Hans Kamp”:http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~hans/ has posted a draft of an article — written jointly with Josef van Genabith and Uwe Reyle — on “Discourse Representation Theory”:http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/~hans//hpl-drt.pdf for the new edition of the Handbook of Philosophical Logic.

[Continuing the German theme of the last two entries]

I was saddened to hear that soccer great “Helmut Rahn passed away yesterday”:http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/soccer/news/2003/08/14/rahnobit/. When I was seven or so and just starting to read, my uncle gave me a book about the 1954 World Cup, which ended with the “Miracle of Bern”, where the mighty Hungarian team (the unbeatable power of the day) lost to the true underdog German team, a bigger upset than the “Miracle on Ice”:http://espn.go.com/gen/miracle/. I must have read the book 15 times, it was my Harry Potter. When we played soccer in our backyard, I was not Helmut Rahn by the way, but “Toni Turek”:http://www.8ung.at/daswundervonbern/heldenturek.htm, the goalkeeper. There’s a motion picture coming out that revolves around the “Wunder von Bern”:http://www.wundervonbern.de/. I hope I can see it some time.

[via “Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey”:http://www.bisso.com/ujg_archives/000195.html, via “Transblawg”:http://www.margaret-marks.com/Transblawg/archives/000280.html]

The “Gesellschaft zur Stärkung der Verben”:http://www.soviseau.de/verben/ is on a crusade to “strengthen” German verbs, i.e. make them inflect not via regular inflectional endings but via stem-internal Ablaut. They have a proposal “to extend this initiative to English”:http://www.soviseau.de/verben/international.htm, for example making “invite” inflect thus: “invite, invote, invitten”. Silly fun.

As I was writing an entry over on Geek Notes about “a new LaTeX solution for slide presentations”:http://semantics-online.org/geek/2003/08/beamerclassforlatexpdfpresentations called “beamer”, I was reminded that when I go to Germany, I am always struck by the many cases of English words in common discourse that are not really English words. In German linguistic terminology, they are called “Scheinentlehnungen”, something like “Pseudo-Loanwords”. My two favorites are ubiquitous:

• “Beamer”, for multimedia or data projector.
• “Handy”, for cellphone.

There’s a decent “article”:http://www.macmillandictionary.com/MED-Magazine/june2003/08-German-English-false-friends.htm on this and related topics in the monthly webzine of the MacMillan English Dictionary. A Google search also turned up “Professor David Yeandle”:http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/schools/hums/german/yeandle.html in the German Department of King’s College London, who has a forthcoming paper with the title ‘Handy Callboy Seeks Evergreen Dressman for Flipper Fun’: Pseudo-Anglicisms in Modern German, which is unfortunately unavailable electronically.

The New York Times, in its Science Times section tomorrow, picks up the story of “the possible Inca knot-based writing system”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/12/science/12INCA.html?ei=5007&en=b4db93eb197878b3&ex=1376020800&partner=USERLAND, noted “here”:http://semantics-online.org/2003/07/incastringtheory over a month ago.