[Language and Thought “again”:http://semantics-online.org/2003/11/languageandthought]

An article in this week’s New York Times Magazine deals with the old question of “whether the color words one’s language has influences one’s color perception”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/30CRASH.html?ex=1385528400&en=176717064a393181&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND.

bq. The world clearly has many shades of color meaning. Literary Welsh has no words that correspond with green, blue, gray or brown in English, but it uses others that English speakers don’t (including one that covers part of green, part of gray and the whole of our blue). Hungarian has two words for what we call red; Navajo, a single word for blue and green but two words for black. Ancient Greek’s emphases on variables like luminosity (as opposed to just hue) led some scholars to wonder seriously whether the culture at large was colorblind.

After summarizing Rosch’s studies from the sixties, two newer findings are reported. I provide some links for follow-up (shouldn’t the Times do that themselves?):

bq. “Debi Roberson, Ian Davies and Jules Davidoff … examined the hunter-gatherer Berinmo tribe of Papua, New Guinea, a people with five basic color terms who don’t distinguish blue from green. … In essence, they found that the Berinmo handled their nol-wor differences better than their blue v. green (while it was vice versa for English speakers). … ‘These results,’ Davidoff and his colleagues contended, ‘indicate that categorical perception occurs, but only for speakers of the language that marks the categorical distinction, which is consistent with the linguistic relativity hypothesis.’”

Even though one of their more prominent articles appeared in Nature and thus shouldn’t be freely available, I did find a link to a “pdf-file”:http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/rgoldsto/perlearn/berinmo.pdf. Debi Roberson’s “homepage”:http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/psychology/CLIENTS/debiRoberson/debiRoberson.html includes links to newer articles, including a 2003 one entitled “Color categories are culturally diverse in cognition as well as in language”.

bq. “[I]n findings presented in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July 2003, [Paul] Kay reported conducting statistical tests on color-naming data from more than 100 languages in both industrial and nonindustrialized societies and concluded that ’strong universal tendencies in color naming exist across both.’”

Paul Kay’s “homepage”:http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/ contains many relevant links, including an earlier reply to the Berinmo work, “Color Categories are Not Arbitrary”, and a link to the “World Color Survey”:http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/. The PNAS article is not freely available.

“Gerhard Jäger”:http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/%7Ejaeger/. “Partial Variables and Specificity”:http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/%7Ejaeger/jos_specificity.pdf, manuscript, University of Potsdam

bq. In this paper I propose a novel analysis of the semantics of specific indefinites. Following standard DRT, I assume that indefinites introduce a free variable into the logical representation, but I assume the the descriptive content of an indefinite DP is interpreted as a precondition of the corresponding variable to denote. Formally this is implemented by an extension of classical predicate logic with partial variables. If a restricted variable is quantified over, the restriction the variable is interpreted as a restriction on the binding quantifier in a syntactically unrestricted way. After an overview over the major existing theories of the scope of indefinites, the central part of the paper is devoted to develop a model-theoretic semantics for this extension of predicate logic. Finally the paper argues that partial variables lends themselves to the analysis of other linguistic phenomena as well. Especially presuppositions can be analyzed as restrictions on variables in a natural way.

“Gerhard Jäger”:http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/%7Ejaeger/. “Alternatives or presuppositions? A comparison of the Background-Presupposition Rule with Alternative Semantics”:http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/%7Ejaeger/tlgvds.pdf, manuscript, University of Potsdam. [Commentary for the peer review journal Theoretical Linguisticson a target article by Geurts and van der Sandt on focus, previously noted “here”:http://semantics-online.org/2003/09/geurtsonfocusandonmonotonicity.]

Today’s “handout on referential definites”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/ind-notes.1.pdf is online.

Tamina asked in class about the possibility of a system where semantic values are assigned to occurrences of expressions rather than to expressions relative to an index. Here is a survey-ish paper by Manfred Kupffer with further literature references:

“Manfred Kupffer”:http://www.uni-konstanz.de/kupffer/Kupffer.shtml. “Occurrence-Dependence”:http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/Philo/Philosophie/Spohn/preprints/PS71-Kupffer.html (”pdf”:http://www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/Philo/Philosophie/kupffer/pdf/OccurrenceDependence.pdf)

The old question of if and how language channels thought is being discussed on on the all-star Language Log in posts by “John McWhorter”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/000128.html and “Mark Liberman”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000129.html. Mark links to a paper by “Lera Boroditsky”:http://www.mit.edu/%7Elera/, who incidentally was the subject of a Boston Globe “portrait”:http://www.boston.com/news/globe/healthscience/articles/2003/11/18/sheexplorestheworldoflanguageandthought/ yesterday (click fast — the article will disappear from the free site — why can’t the Globe have free archives like its corporate sister, the New York Times?). In a sidebar, we find under Family status:

bq. No children. No pets. “I can hardly even remember to clothe and feed myself on a regular basis.”

No comment.

Here’s a little puzzle (related or perhaps even essentially identical to matters discussed in the lecture notes). It is inspired by Sabine’s remark that while one can say “I might not have been here”, one cannot really say “I might (not) be here” (with a present time reference — there is of course a good future-oriented reading), presumably because … (fill in the blank on your own).

What is going on in the following dialogue that suddenly seems to allow something like “I might (not) be here”?

A: [making a cellphone call] Hi. This Joe.

B: [on the other end] Hi Joe. Are you here?

A: I might be. Or I might not. I think I took the right exit, but now I’m totally confused and don’t recognize any of the streets. Can you help me get oriented?

The three readings I mentioned in class today are available electronically:

Stalnaker: “Pragmatics”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/protected/stalnaker.pdf

Kripke: “Speaker’s Reference and Semantic Reference”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/protected/kripke.pdf

Fodor & Sag: “Referential and Quantificational Indefinites”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/protected/fodor_sag.pdf

These are pdf-files of hand-scans, so they are large. A convenient and recommended way of getting nice copies of the Kripke and Fodor & Sag papers (and many other useful articles) is to purchase the “collection”:http://tinyurl.com/vj28 edited by Peter Ludlow from MIT Press. Stalnaker’s paper is reprinted in his collection “Context and Content”.

The Stalnaker and Kripke papers are optional readings. The Fodor & Sag paper is required (and essential for a well-rounded education in linguistics).

[Back from a short trip to Germany. Cleaning out the deskdrawer.]

Two papers on epistemic modality:

“John MacFarlane”:http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Ejmacf/work.html, “Epistemic Modalities and Relative Truth”:http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Ejmacf/epistmod.pdf

bq. I want to discuss a puzzle about the semantics of epistemic modals, like “It might be the case that” as it occurs in “It might be the case that Goldbach’s conjecture is false.” I’ll argue that the puzzle cannot be adequately explained on standard accounts of the semantics of epistemic modals, and that a proper solution requires relativizing utterance truth to a context of assessment, a semantic device whose utility and coherence I have defended elsewhere for future contingents.

“Andy Egan”:http://www.geocities.com/eganamit/papers.html, John Hawthorne and Brian Weatherson. “Epistemic Modals in Context”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/em.pdf

bq. In the 1970s David Lewis argued for a contextualist treatment of modals (Lewis 1976, 1979a). Although Lewis was primarily interested in modals connected with freedom and metaphysical possibility, his arguments for contextualism could easily be taken to support contextualism about epistemic modals. In the 1990s Keith DeRose argued for just that position (DeRose 1991, 1998).
In all contextualist treatments, the method by which the contextual variables get their values is not completely specified. For contextualist treatments of metaphysical modality, the important value is the class of salient worlds. For contextualist treatments of epistemic modality, the important value is which epistemic agents are salient. In this paper, we start by investigating how these values might be generated, and conc lude that there’s no plausible story to be told about how they are generated. There are too many puzzle cases for a simple contextualist theory to be true, and a complicated contextualist story is implausibly ad hoc.
We then look at what happens if we replace contextualism with relativism. On contextualist theories the truth of an utterance type is relative to the context in which it is tokened. On relativist theories, the truth of an utterance token is also relative to the context in which it is evaluated. Many of the puzzles for contextualism turn out to have natural, even elegant, solutions given relativism. We conclude by comparing two versions of relativism, one due to John MacFarlane (2003, ms) and one motivated by David Lewis’s work on de se belief. We will start with a puzzle about the role of epistemic modals in speech reports.

You might want to read some “lecture notes on indexicality”:http://tinyurl.com/ups3 before next week’s meetings. These are notes written by Irene a while back. I am working on revisions but for now these should do. They are in HTML format so read them in your browser or print them out.

This is just a reminder that there will be no class tomorrow, because I will be in Germany. We meet again next Tuesday to start talking about indexicality. Registered students should be emailing me with squib proposals so that we can make appointments to discuss them.

I will be joining Gennaro Chierchia and Jeff Pelletier as a series editor for “Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy”:http://www.wkap.nl/prod/s/SLAP (SLAP), published by Kluwer. I’m replacing Polly Jacobson, who will take on the position of editor-in-chief of the journal Linguistics and Philosophy.

As I take on this job, I am planning to make sure that, as much as possible, principles of cheap and easy access to scientific work will be put into practice. You may have noticed a pledge that Kluwer made in the silver anniversary edition of L&P:

bq. ANNOUNCEMENT: Kluwer is pleased to announce its decision to publish all future titles in the Linguistics programme (series: SNLT, SLAP, SITP, TLTB, ARGU) simultaneously in paperback. We are aware that in the past the price of our publications has become a strong issue with the linguistics community. Kluwer is committed to the importance of research being widely available, accessible and affordable and we hope that our paperback editions will bring our titles back within reach for everyone.

Having the books be affordable is a good step. Another big step would be to have online accessible files of chapters/papers from upcoming volumes. Kluwer does this for journals like “Synthese” and “Philosophical Studies”. No reason why this shouldn’t be possible for books (especially collections of papers).

And finally, it would be good if authors retained the right to have preprint manuscripts on their personal websites.

In any case, if anyone has interesting book ideas in linguistics and philosophy, get in touch with me (or with Gennaro or Jeff), and we’ll talk.

PS Like “Peter Suber”:http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/20031102_fosblogarchive.html#a106833823009542977, I am not impressed with the newest statement from a consortium of science publishers, including Kluwer, on open access to scientific work.

Bart Geurts & Emar Maier. “Layered DRT”:http://www.kun.nl/phil/tfl/bart/papers/ldrt.pdf. ms, University of Nijmegen, November 7, 2003.

bq. The information conveyed by any utterance is a motley ensemble. Utterances carry content about the world as it is according to the speaker, but also about speakers’ attitudes, the way they speak, what has been said before, and so on. There are many kinds of information that are conveyed by way of language, and differences in kind correlate with differences in status. Presupposed information exhibits a distinctive projection behaviour; conversational implicatures are cancellable in a way that asserted information is not; a pronoun’s gender may help to determine a referent, but is otherwise truth-conditionally inert; and so on.
Interpreting utterances is as much a matter of integrating these various kinds of information as of keeping them apart. This much is uncontroversial. As far as we are aware, however, no attempts have been made thus far to devise a fully general framework within which processes of information integration can be modeled. There are partial theories, to be sure. For example, there are quite a few well-developed analyses of the interaction between presupposed and non-presupposed content. But to the best of our knowledge the problem of information integration as such has not been addressed before. So that is what this paper is about: a general framework for representing and integrating all and sundry kinds of information that can be conveyed by linguistic means. This may seem like a grandiose project, and perhaps it is, but it is less ambitious than one might think. Our aim in this paper is to develop a framework for representing different kinds of linguistic and para-linguistic information. How this information is processed is a different matter altogether, and not our main concern in the following.