I apologize for not having my lecture notes ready for the past two meetings. I just uploaded a draft of some “notes”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/expressive.pdf. They will be filled out in the next few days. I have added a couple of pages spelling out the alternative system I mulled over in class. Please look at it and let me know whether there are any obvious mistakes. I am well aware that as it is, it falls far short of being explicit and clean. But I trust the idea can be glimpsed. It would be interesting if Potts’ results could be replicated in such a system, one without an intermediary “meaning language”.
Since I will be updating this handout over the next few days, I’ll be keeping track here of when the latest version was posted:
Last Updated: 10/31, 4:55pm.
Next week, we will examine the possibility that expressions of epistemic modality (and related expressions) operate in the layer of expressive meanings/conventional implicatures, whose analysis we are discussing this week.
A relevant reading is a paper by “Anna Papafragou”:http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~anna4/.
- “Epistemic modality and truth conditions”:http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~anna4/papers/epmodtruth.pdf. To appear in A. Klinge & H. Müller (eds.), Perspectives on Modality (working title). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
[New at the “Semantics Archive”:http://semanticsarchive.net]
Anthony Gillies. “Epistemic Conditionals and Conditional Epistemics”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/GQzZGE0M/. Preprint of an article accepted for publication in Noûs.
François Recanati (2002) “Deixis and anaphora”:http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/disk0/00/00/04/11/ (final version, October 2003), in Zoltan Szabo, Ed. Semantics vs. Pragmatics. Oxford University Press. (”RTF”:http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/documents/disk0/00/00/04/11/ijn0000041100/ijn0000041100.rtf)
bq. According to the pragmatic theory of anaphora, anaphoric uses of pronouns are free uses, like deictic uses and associative uses. Evans’s argument against the pragmatic theory has been shown to rest on unargued assumptions. In the version of the pragmatic theory I have outlined, anaphoric uses of pronouns turn out to be very similar to deictic uses. Like deictic uses, anaphoric uses are ‘indexical’ in the rather strict sense discussed by Nunberg: their content is contextually determined in terms of some feature of the situation of utterance (the index). For demonstratives the index is a position in space ; for anaphoric pronouns, it is a position in ‘discourse space’, i.e. an argument position articulated in the surrounding discourse.
Andrea Bonomi. “Truth and Reference in Context”:http://www.filosofia.unimi.it/~bonomi/truthref11.pdf
bq. Abstract. In communicative exchanges, sentences are uttered against a background of shared beliefs or attitudes which helps the audience to determine the content of what the speaker has said. Unfortunately, different agents may have different views of this common ground. From this standpoint, one of the most familiar phenomena is accommodation, which enables the addressee to incorporate the speaker’s presuppositions into her own view of the common ground. As suggested by definition (URR), this phenomenon is analyzed here as a case of global context shift, since the missing piece of information, which the addressee is willing to share, will be an integral part of the revised context.
A less familiar, but equally important, phenomenon is what I call discommodation, whose main feature consists in the fact that the missing piece of information, although essential to the comprehension of the utterance, cannot be shared by the addressee because it sounds problematic or even false to her. This is not a marginal aspect of communicative exchanges, which are often characterized not only by different views of the common ground, but also by incompatible views. In such cases the addressee opens a “presuppositional slot” to take into account the assumptions which serve to select the reference of the noun phrase, but which are not incorporated into the revised context because of the addressee’s disagreement. Thus, such a process is analyzed as a case of local context shift, which affects only the noun phrase and which, unlike global context shifts, allows us to keep considerations about reference distinct from considerations about truth.
Starting from the problem of the truth-value of sentences uttered in contexts containing false assumptions, one of the main purposes of the paper is to propose a definition of truth (with respect to a presuppositional apparatus) which does not ignore the role of discommodation when different views of the common ground are involved. The relevant truth conditions are given in (TC). Finally, this definition is used in the last two sections of the paper to justify the idea that, in the cases of misdecription made popular by Donnellan, one can recognize the semantic role of the speaker’s reference without assuming the ambiguity of the definite descriptions.
Starting on Thursday, we will discuss expressive meaning. This is a new topic for this course, so we will have to see what develops. The person who wrote the book on expressive meaning (a.k.a. conventional implicature), or rather is still writing it, is “Chris Potts”:http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~potts/. As our first reading, we will use a survey article that he wrote:
- Potts, Christopher. 2003. “Conventional implicatures, a distinguished class of meanings”:http://www-unix.oit.umass.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.
You could also look at his dissertation “The Logic of Conventional Implicatures” (available in a variety of formats from his web page) and a class handout on “Central Properties of Expressives”:http://people.umass.edu/potts/class5-expressives.pdf (from the current “Proseminar in Semantics”:http://www.people.umass.edu/potts/proseminar03.html at UMass).
Supplemental readings (not required) are David Kaplan’s paper on “Ouch and Oops” and Angelika Kratzer’s comments “Beyond Ouch and Oops“:
[New at the “Semantics Archive”:http://semanticsarchive.net/]
Stefan Kaufmann. “Conditional truth and future reference”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/zUyODE1N/.
bq. This paper proposes a compositional model-theoretic account of how the interpretation of indicative conditionals is determined and constrained by temporal and modal expressions in their constituents with special attention paid to the “indicative/epistemic” distinction.
I have added a section on presupposition and context change to the “bibliography”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/biblio.pdf.
A 1998 draft manuscript of mine discusses some of the evidence for a presuppositional reading of indefinites. It can serve as a handout for the first part of tomorrow’s class. In the second half, we’ll talk about Strawson-Entailment.
- von Fintel, Kai. 1998. “Evidence for Presuppositional Indefinites”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/presupp_indef.pdf. unpublished ms, MIT.
Caroline Heycock. “On the interaction of adjectival modifiers and relative clauses”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/mJlMTA3N/. Draft. 15th October 2003
bq. In this paper I [argue] that the central cases of “low” readings for adjectival modifiers of a noun that is further modified by a relative clause occur with modifiers that generate negative entailments. These entailments may further license the “short-circuited implicatures” referred to as Neg Raising (Horn 1989), and it is this phenomenon which is responsible for the “low” interpretations. Unquestionably many mysteries remain (how Neg Raising should be formalised is a notoriously difficult problem), but at the least this view models with some accuracy the otherwise surprisingly limited distribution of these readings. In Bhatt 2002 it is argued that the low readings are the result of reconstruction of the noun and the modifier into the relative clause, and hence that they constitute evidence for the “raising analysis” of relative clauses. If I am correct, such reconstruction is not necessary to account for the interpretations available; and in fact if it necessarily gives rise to “low” readings the system will overgenerate massively. Whether or not this constitutes evidence against the raising analysis of relative clauses depends on whether this analysis really does entail the existence of low readings. If it does, the facts presented here suggest that it must be revised.
I have updated the “syllabus”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/syllabus.pdf. In particular, I have revised and filled in the course calendar on the last page. Note that the week of Veterans Day, we will not have a class meeting on either class day (Tue no classes at MIT, Thu I am out of town). The due date for the squib proposal has therefore been changed to Nov 18.
Gina C Taranto. “Discourse Adjectives”:http://ling.ucsd.edu/~taranto/DiscourseAdjectives2up.pdf. PhD Dissertation, UCSD. 2003.
bq. This thesis introduces Discourse Adjectives (DAs), a natural class whose members include apparent, evident, clear, and obvious, as in (1).
(1) a. It is clear that Briscoe is a detective.
b. It is clear to you and me that Briscoe is a detective.
Of primary concern are the semantics of DAs in sentences like (1a), in which the conceptually necessary experiencer of clear is not expressed syntactically, and is interpreted much like (1b), with the relevant experiencers of clarity interpreted as the discourse participants - that is, both the speaker and the addressee.
I argue that the meaning of utterances such as (1a) are highly unusual semantically, in that they operate entirely on a metalinguistic level. Interlocutors use such utterances to provide information about their conversation rather than their world. Sentence (1a) does not provide new information about Briscoe, rather, it provides information about the interlocutor’s beliefs about the designated proposition, in terms of the current conversation.
My analysis begins with a Stalnakerian model of context-update, as formalized by Heim (1982, 1983) and Beaver (2000). I augment this model with Gunlogson’s (2001) representation of individual commitment sets of speaker and addressee within the Common Ground of a discourse, and Barker’s (2002) compositional theory of vagueness.
My proposal relies on the (vague) degree of probability that the Discourse Participants assign to the truth of a proposition; the context-update effect of an utterance of (1a) removes from consideration those possible worlds in which the discourse participants do not believe the proposition expressed by Briscoe is a detective satisfies a vague minimum standard for ‘clarity’. The semantics of utterances with DAs are shown to depend directly on probability, and only indirectly on truth. I argue that after an utterance with a DA is accepted into the Common Ground, interlocutors are licensed to proceed as if the designated proposition is true, if only for the current discussion.
DAs are argued to have the ability to publicly commit all discourse participants to the content of their complements. This is shown to have a synchronization effect on the Common Ground of a discourse, which explains how it can be useful to have an expression type that has no normal descriptive content.
[New at the “Semantics Archive”:http://semanticsarchive.net]
Jill de Villiers, Angelika Kratzer, Tom Roeper. “From Evidence to Belief: Developmental Precursors for False Belief Ascriptions”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/TI1YzY2Z. Project description submitted to NSF, Smith College and University of Massachusetts at Amherst January 2000.
bq. Recently, a fruitful line of inquiry has linked children’s acquisition of the language of the mind to their developing understanding of other minds. In particular, a cascade of linguistic effects regarding sentences embedded under mental verbs has been shown to occur around the age of four years for the average child, roughly the age when children start passing standard false belief tests. This set of linguistic effects is summarized briefly below. In the proposed study, we will turn our attention to possible precursors for the ability to ascribe a false belief to another person. These precursors include knowledge about how people form beliefs from the evidence of their senses and by what evidence they judge the existence of such belief states in others. To explore such questions, we will examine how children acquire some selected constructions relating to the path leading from evidence to belief: epistemic uses of modals such as ‘must’ and ‘might’ and direct and indirect perception reports using verbs like ’see’.
[New at the “Semantics Archive”:http://semanticsarchive.net]
Anastasia Giannakidou. 2003. “Polarity and the presuppositions of EVEN”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/DRkMTNhY/polarity.even.pdf. Submitted to Natural Language Semantics. 44 pp.
bq. This paper argues for a generalization of the polarity thesis for English even and crosslinguistically. It is proposed that the distribution of even is entirely regulated by polarity, and a three-way distinction between a positive polarity, negative polarity, and a concessive even is posited. Evidence for the distinction is provided by Greek, which distinguishes lexically the three items. The distributional restrictions are shown to follow from the distinct presuppositions of the three items, a significant advantage over earlier polarity approaches which favored composition external filters. This result deprives the main competitor to the polarity theory, namely the scope theory, of its conceptual appeal. On the empirical side, it is noted that: (a) there is no syntactic evidence for a wide scope even in English or in Greek; (b) alleged counterarguments to negative polarity even (Infl-even, and even in questions) actually provide an argument in favor of polarity; and (c) the bottom-of-scale presupposition of positive even remains problematic with negation, hence it cannot be part of the explanation of the distribution of even-containing polarity items which are impeccable with negation.
Anastasia Giannakidou. 2002. ”N-words and negative concord”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/DgyYzI2M/negative.concord.pdf. Final, pre-publication version, August 2002. To appear in The Linguistics Companion, edited by Henk van Riemsdijk, Rob Goedemans et al., Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS), Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW). In press with Blackwell, Oxford.
Anastasia Giannakidou. 2002. Until crosslinguistically, aspect and negation: a novel argument for two until’s. In Brendan Jackson (ed.), Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 12, CLC Publications, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. 84-103.
[Two links from the APA’s “Philosophy in the News”:http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/philnews/ service]
10-14-2003 (Spectator.co.uk, 9/20/03) “The truth about meaning”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php3?table=old%A7ion=current&issue=2003-09-20&id=3523 Roger Scruton on the importance of Donald Davidson, the analytical philosopher who died on 30 August.
10-14-2003 (The Edge, 2003) “That Damn Bird”:http://www.edge.org/3rdculture/pepperberg03/pepperbergindex.html A Talk with Irene Pepperberg on parrots who understand syntax and meaning.
In case you had been wondering about the etymology of the new rallying slogan of the Boston Red Sox, an Associated Press article explains that “Cowboy Up”:http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/print?id=1637334&type=story is a term from the sport of rodeo and there “describes riders who get thrown, dust themselves off, and get back on the horse.” Apparently, the phrase is owned by the company Wyoming West Design, based in Jackson.
Absolutely not fabulous, a Guardian column on adjectivitis.
The brand new open access journal “PLoS Biology”:http://www.plosbiology.org/plosonline/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0000034 has a blockbuster article today: “Learning to Control a Brain-Machine Interface for Reaching and Grasping by Primates” [”Synopsis”:http://www.plosbiology.org/pips/plbi-01-02-S-carmena.pdf, “Full Text”:http://www.plosbiology.org/pips/plbi-01-02-carmena.pdf].
bq. With visual feedback, macaque monkeys learn to control a robot arm through a neural interface which records activity from multiple cortical areas.
There are news accounts at the “New Scientist”:http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994262, the “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17434-2003Oct12?language=printer, and in the “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/13/science/13BRAI.html?ei=5007&en=5d7e4776c71a3d9f&ex=1381464000&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=print&position=.
Geoffrey Nunberg. “Rush Limbaugh’s Plurals”:http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg//rush.html. “Fresh Air” commentary, Oct. 13, 2003
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