A weblog on semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and intersections thereof
Maribel Romero. “Concealed Questions and Specificational Subjects” (submitted to Linguistics and Philosophy)
The goal of this paper is to argue for a unified semantic analysis of concealed question NPs and specificational subject NPs.
Update: Maribel has posted a final preprint version of the paper, which has now been accepted by L&P.
The notes for today’s first class on presupposition are available. Update Notes for the second class have been added to the document.
[Thanks to “Brian Weatherson”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002205.html, who pointed at the forthcoming papers page of the journal Synthese]
Two papers forthcoming in Synthese (these are uncorrected proofs):
Nicholas Asher and Daniel Bonevac. “Free Choice Permission Is Strong Permission”:http://ipsapp008.kluweronline.com/content/getfile/5191/74/9/fulltext.pdf.
Leon Horsten. On The Quantitative Scalar Or-Implicature.
bq. Abstract. Two simple generalized conversational implicatures are investigated: (1) the quantitative scalar implicature associated with ‘or’, and (2) the ‘not-and’-implicature, which is the dual to (1). It is argued that it is more fruitful to consider these implicatures as rules of interpretation and to model them in an algebraic fashion than to consider them as nonmonotonic rules of inference and to model them in a proof-theoretic way.
Paul Pietroski. “Meaning Before Truth”:http://www.wam.umd.edu/%7Epietro/research/papers/mbt.pdf (for a volume of essays on contextualism)
bq. This paper extends the line of thought in “The Character of Natural Language Semantics.” A running theme is that Chomsky offers a conception of semantics that lets us preserve what is right about truth-conditional semantics–and this has less to do with truth than the usual rhetoric suggests–while also preserving late-Wittgensteinian/Austinian insights about the relation between truth, meaning, and context. There are three main sections: one about the relevance of negative facts (and nativism) for semantics, and why this tells against both “deflationary” conceptions of meaning and Quine-Davidson “interpretability” conceptions; one that reviews some familiar reasons for rejecting the hypothesis that names denote things in the environment; and one that concedes externalism about truth, while noting that externalism about linguistic meaning does not follow. The paper ends with a brief tour of some alternatives, and some familiar reasons for rejecting the hypothesis that predicates are satisfied by things in the environment. (Further work along these lines is planned, but not before summer 2004: a companion paper “Character Before Context,” for a volume of essays honoring Robert Stalnaker; and a monograph Semantics without Truth Values, for OUP.)
The first reading for the unit on presupposition is a classic by Bob Stalnaker:
Stalnaker, Robert C.: 1974. “Pragmatic Presuppositions”. In Milton K. Munitz and Peter Unger, eds. Semantics and Philosophy. New York: New York University Press. pp. 197–213. Reprinted in Robert C. Stalnaker: 1999. Context and Content: Essays on Intentionality in Speech and Thought. Oxford University Press. Chapter 2, pp. 47–62.
Please get a start on reading the paper before Tuesday’s class meeting.
“Jacqueline Lecarme”:http://www.llf.cnrs.fr/fr/Lecarme/ has two papers on nominal tense:
bq. This paper explores a largely ignored, but I believe highly revealing, parallel between the verbal and nominal domains with respect to the interaction of tense, modality and evidentiality. I focus on the relation between nominal tense and (direct) evidentiality in Somali, a language of the East Cushitic family. I specifically address the following questions: Why is it that the -ii morphology that shows up on Somali determiners alternates between a past tense meaning and a direct evidential meaning, i.e., the expression of (non)- visibility? What are the formal mechanisms that can explain the double use of the past/evidential forms crosslinguistically? Building on work by Izvorski (1997) and Iatridou (2000), I will argue that the evidential character (non-visible) is a particular instance of a modal use of the past tense. In addition, by discussing other (non-temporal and non-evidential) uses of modalized determiners in the particular contexts of generic and habitual sentences, free relatives, conditional clauses, I will explore the possibility that Kratzer’s (1981, 1991) theory of relative modality might lead to a unified analysis of the tense/evidentiality connection, including the one found in nominals.
[Note: the pdf files look a little fuzzy onscreen, but should print out fine. I tried “my usual trick”:http://semantics-online.org/geek/2003/02/fixingbitmappedpostscript_files, but for some reason it didn’t work.]
Update: The download links have changed and the pdf files now display OK.
Robert van Rooy and Katrin Schultz. “Pragmatic Meaning and Non-monotonic Reasoning: The Case of Exhaustive Interpretation”:http://turing.wins.uva.nl/~vanrooy/exhLP-r.pdf (submitted)
bq. In this paper, we study the phenomenon of exhaustive interpretation. We discuss an analysis of exhaustification as interpretation in preference structures using work in non-monotonic reasoning. We first will discuss the proposal of Groenendijk & Stokhof (1984) and some problems it has to face. Then, the similarity of this account to predicate circumscription as introduced by McCarthy is discussed, an observation already made by van Benthem (1989). Finally the idea of interpretation in preferred models and independent developments in semantics/pragmatics are brought together to overcome the previously discussed limitations. Exhaustification is defined as a dynamic update function, circumscribing the predicate the question is about relative to the given answer. This predicate is defined in terms of relevance. (An earlier version of this paper appeared as `Exhaustification’ in the Tilburg workshop on computational semantics, January, 2003)
[From the “Sydney Morning Herald”:http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/21/1064082853528.html]
bq. A Japanese mountaineer is attempting to settle once and for all the decades-long debate over the existence of the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, claiming that his years of study have shown that the legendary apelike monster is in fact a brown bear.
Makoto Nebuka, 56, a senior member of the Japanese Alpine Club, plans to publish the results of his 12 years of research which led him to conclude the mysterious creature, known as the “Yeti,” is really the endangered Himalayan Brown Bear (Ursus Arctos).
Nebuka’s theory rests on a linguistic discovery: Through a series of interviews with local people in Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan, he has found that “yeti” is a regional dialect word for “meti”, meaning bear.
Ethnic Tibetan tribes who are scared of the powerful bears which often attack their villages, worship the meti/yeti as a dreadful, supernatural creature, Nebuka said.
“Combining the deified image with people’s imaginations, the figure of the Abominable Snowman has been rooted in people’s minds and the apelike monster image has spread too far,” Nebuka said.
[New at the “Semantics Archive”:http://semanticsarchive.net]
Veneeta Dayal, Number Marking and (In)definiteness in Kind Terms, to appear in Linguistics and Philosophy
bq. Abstract This paper explores the link between number marking and (in)definiteness in nominals and their interpretation. Differences between bare singulars and plurals in languages without determiners are explained by treating bare nominals as kind terms. Differences arise, it is argued, because singular and plural kinds relate differently to their instantiations. In languages with determiners, singular kinds typically occur with the definite determiner, but plural/mass kinds can be bare in some languages and definite in others. An account of singular kinds in terms of taxonomic readings is proposed, with number marking playing a crucial role in explaining the obligatory presence of the determiner. The variation between languages with respect to plural/mass kinds is explained by positing a universal scale of definiteness, with individual languages choosing different cut-off points for lexicalization of the definite determiner. The possibility of further cross-linguistic variation is also considered.
John Pollock is making available his logic textbook: “Logic: An Introduction to the Formal Study of Reasoning”:http://oscarhome.soc-sci.arizona.edu/ftp/Logic%20text.html.
bq. This is a text for an introductory symbolic logic course. It is based upon an old text that I wrote in 1969, which is long out of print. But it modifies the approach of that book to reflect theoretical work that I have done on theorem proving in the OSCAR Project. The most important innovation is to formalize the use of bidirectional reasoning. The idea behind the book is that people use bidirectional reasoning naturally, but by making the students aware of their use of it and having them adopt a notation that keeps track of it, we make it easier for them to prove theorems in logic.
At this time I have no plans for publishing this book. There are too many logic texts already on the market to make that useful. So it will only be web-published. Anyone who wants to use this text is free to do so, either for their own use or as the text in a course. I ask only that you give me any useful feedback you may have.
Bart Geurts (with Rob van der Sandt). “Interpreting focus”:http://www.kun.nl/phil/tfl/bart/papers/focus.pdf. ms in progress.
bq. Abstract Although it is widely agreed, if often only tacitly, that there is a close connection between focus and presupposition, recent research has tended to shy away from the null hypothesis, which is that focus is systematically associated with presupposition along the following lines:
The Background-Presupposition Rule (BPR)
Whenever focusing gives rise to a background lambdax.phi(x), there is a presupposition to the effect that lambda x.phi(x) holds of some individual.
This paper aims to show, first, that the evidence in favour of the BPR is in fact rather good, and attempts to clarify its role in the interpretation of focus particles like ‘only’ and ‘too’, arguing that unlike the former the latter is focus-sensitive in an idiosyncratic way, adding its own interpretative constraints to those of the BPR. The last part of the paper discusses various objections that have been raised against the BPR, taking a closer look at the peculiarities of ‘nobody’ and ’somebody’, and comparing the interpretative effects of focusing with those of it-clefts.
Bart Geurts (with Frans van der Slik). “Ups and downs in syllogistic reasoning”:http://www.kun.nl/phil/tfl/bart/papers/upsdowns.pdf. ms in progress.
bq. Abstract The difficulty of a syllogistic argument is affected by the meanings of the quantifiers it contains and the way they are arranged. A quantifier may be upward entailing (i.e. license inferences from subsets to supersets) or downward entailing (i.e. license inferences from supersets to subsets). We present data showing that sentences and arguments containing both types of quantifier are more difficult than others. Furthermore, inferences from subsets to supersets turn out to be easier than inferences that go in the opposite direction.
Manfred Krifka. “Bare NPs: Kind-referring, Indefinites, Both, or Neither?”:http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/BarePluralsSalt13.pdf To be published in the proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 13.
bq. Conclusion This paper set out with the controversy around the semantic nature of bare NPs in English: Are they kind referring, or ambiguous between a kind-referring and an indefinite interpretation. The answer, which required a type shift framework as developed in Chierchia (1998), is: Bare NPs are basically properties, hence they are neither kind-referring nor indefinites. They can be shifted to one or the other interpretation in appropriate linguistic contexts. They cannot be called ambiguous either, as their basic meaning is always a property. In a sense, all disjuncts in the title of this talk are true: Bare NPs have kind-referring interpretations, they have indefinite interpretations, hence they have both kind-referring and indefinite. But basically they are neither one nor the other. The type shifting framework is flexible enough to make all these statements true.
Stealthily, a new linguistics weblog has appeared. “Language Log”:http://www.languagelog.org/ is a group effort involving Steven Bird, Mark Liberman, Chris Potts, and Geoff Pullum. Among the offerings, an analysis by Pullum of Bush’s infamous statement “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”, and Potts’ discovery that the New Yorker magazine appears to have outlawed quotative inversion, which results in some truly awkward syntax.
Can’t wait for more.
At UMass Amherst, “Chris Potts”:http://people.umass.edu/potts/ is teaching a course that has significant thematical overlap with our pragmatics course. Have look at his “course website”:http://people.umass.edu/potts/proseminar03.html, especially the “calendar with links to handouts and such”:http://people.umass.edu/potts/proseminar03-calendar.html.
There is an updated version of the implicature bibliography, with most of the additions coming in the last couple of sections, especially concerning embedded implicatures.
Note also the addition of Jennings’ book on disjunction and his entry on disjunction in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which contains discussion of the myth of Latin vel vs. aut, which we touched on for a second on Tuesday.
The (drafty, not much updated) lecture notes for Classes 2–4 on implicature are now “available”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/implicature.pdf.
[New at the “Semantics Archive”:http://semanticsarchive.net]
Daniel Büring: “Focus Projection and Default Prominence”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/DVmMzI4M/. Version from 9/5/03 — 1st draft, comments welcome.
bq. In this paper I try to eliminate focus projection rules, i.e. rules that define which patterns of F(ocus)-markers in a phrase structure tree are permitted, and which are not. […] The goal of this paper is not entirely novel, and views and arguments similar to the ones presented here have been given in particular in section 6 of Schwarzschild (1999). I mainly try to marshal more evidence, and refine the theoretical proposal given there.
Brian Weatherson has a post on The History of Semantics with this postscript:
Senior women in philosophy of language, particularly in semantics in philosophy departments, are not exactly flooding the marketplace. The contrast with what we see in linguistics is striking. Just in New England a list of the most important semanticists would have Partee, Heim, Kratzer, Jacobson and Iatridou at or near the top. I’m just making observations here, not making prescriptions, and there are sample size effects to consider, but I really don’t think the contrast reflects at all well on philosophy.
David Harris’ Science and Literature:
bq. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.
Update This is spreading like wildfire through the internet. See postings at languagehat, Uncle Jazzbeau, Crooked Timber, wo’s weblog, the latter with a neat scramble bookmarklet. David Harris has an update, revealing that he changed his post a couple of times to track its spread. Nobody that I have seen so far has found the source.
Another Update The topic has been slashdotted. Uncle Jazzbeau, who was the main target of the slashdot effect, has a very informative update. My blog entry here shows up as the first result of a Google search for “Aoccdrnig to rscheearch”, for reasons probably having to do with my entry titles appearing in the permalink to the entry, which is driving an amazing amount of traffic here, all of which presumably deeply disappointed, which is why I bother to update the entry.
Yet Another Update Uncle Jazzbeau has “more information”:http://www.bisso.com/ujg_archives/000228.html on the topic.
Just a quick referral: check out the new group weblog “A Fistful of Euros”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/ with a promising European political and cultural slant. There is a linguistic post about the plural of “Euro”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000005.php [noted a while back by “languagehat”:http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000817.php]. One of the weblog authors also has a personal blog “Pedantry”:http://pedantry.blogspot.com/, with language-related content [thanks to “Geoff Nunberg”:http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/ for the link].
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