Semantics etc.

This is the course website for this spring’s incarnation of the course 24.973 Advanced Semantics. The first class meeting is on February 3. See you then.

Emmon Bach, “A Chrestomathy of Chestnuts”:http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~ebach/papers/chestnut.htm. 111 pronoun puzzles from 1977.

bq. handout from a talk at Stanford, during the year I spent at Casbah (Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences). I think it was at a workshop for philosophers and linguists, organized by J. Moravcsik. The philosophers were apalled at the number of examples.

Emmon Bach, Structure and Texture: Toward an Understanding of Real Languages. Paper presented at WECOL 2002, UBC.

bq. About: the tensions between the inner and outer view of R-languages (”real languages”), the language-centered and theory-centered study of languages, the (often foreign) linguist and the (sometimes linguist) native speaker, description and theory, a language as a set of choices and extensions of universal grammar and as a concrete realization in a particular culture and history. The materials for this paper are drawn mostly from First Nations languages, especially those of the Pacific Northwest.

Angelika Kratzer. A Note on Choice Functions in Context. December 29, 2003.

‘Tis the season of list making. Leiter, for example, has people list the “most significant books in philosophy over the last quarter century”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000594.html, divided by subfields.

I am starting to prepare for next semester’s advanced semantics course. One thing I plan to hand out at the beginning is a list of the essential readings in semantics (including pragmatics and philosophy of language). I have made a start, drawing mostly on the table of contents of Portner and Partee’s Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings and Veltman’s list of 40 “classics in formal semantics and pragmatics”:http://turing.wins.uva.nl/~veltman/classics.htm. I put “the result”:http://semantics-online.org/files/readings.pdf up for your perusal.

Please use the comments (or email, if you prefer) to suggest additions, subtractions, substitutions. In the next iteration, I plan to add some more recent “instant classics” to lead students closer to current research. I would especially like suggestions for such articles.

In a separate post, I will comment on what it means for the field that such a list seems like a useful idea (I doubt that a similar thought would occur to a nuclear physicist).

Update Routledge has just published a huge 6 volume set “Semantics”, edited by Javier Gutirrez-Rexach, containing “the most important contributions to semantic theory ranging from Gottlob Frege’s 1892 essay “On Sense and Reference” to recent cutting-edge scholarship from leading journals in the field”. The table of contents lists 101 items. This could serve as a useful long short list to select readings from. I have found it difficult to link directly to a page with the contents of this collection, so I uploaded the “table of contents”:http://semantics-online.org/files/semantics-contents.html myself.

Update See “this entry”:http://lambda.weblogs.com/discuss/msgReader$10513 and associated comments at “Lambda the Ultimate”:http://lambda.weblogs.com/. It appears that my comments are already anticipated with bated breath.

Carmen Rotstein and Yoad Winter. 2003: Total Adjectives vs. Partial Adjectives: Scale Structure and Higher-Order Modifiers. To appear in Natural Language Semantics. An earlier version appeared in Proceedings of the Amsterdam Colloquium.

bq. This paper studies the distinction that was proposed in previous works between total and partial adjectives. In pairs of adjectives such as safe-dangerous, clean-dirty and healthy-sick, the first (”total”) adjective describes lack of danger, dirt, malady etc., while the second (”partial”) adjective describes the existence of such properties. It is shown that the semantics of adjective phrases with modifiers such as almost, slightly, and completely is sensitive to whether the adjective is total or partial. The interpretation of such modified constructions is accounted for using a novel scale structure for total and partial adjectives. It is proposed that the standard value of a total adjective is always fixed as the lower bound of the corresponding partial adjective. By contrast, the standard value of partial adjectives can take any point on the relative scale. The effects of this theoretical distinction on the behavior of modified constructions are studied in detail. Some other phenomena that are explored show evidence for total and partial adjectival compounds, including comparatives and exceptive constructions.

“Germania et alia”:http://odur.let.rug.nl/~koster/DenBesten/contents.htm. A Linguistic Webschrift for Hans den Besten on the occasion of his 55th Birthday (December 18, 2003), edited by Jan Koster and Henk van Riemsdijk.

Lots of interesting papers, including the Verkuyl paper mentioned “earlier today”:http://semantics-online.org/2003/12/verkuylonthesemanticsof_complementizers.

Henk Verkuyl. “On the Semantics of Complementizers”:http://www.let.uu.nl/~Henk.Verkuyl/personal/tense/semcomp.pdf.

bq. This paper is about the semantic differences between a sentential complement headed by a subordinate conjunction and a infinitival complement. A proper description of these differences requires a choice between two types of tense systems available in the literature. Both use points of reference but they are different as to the dimensions determining the set up of the system. From this point of view, it will be argued that Reichenbach’s 1947-system fails to account for the difference between the two types of complement due to its 3×3 design, whereas a 2×2x2 set up of Te Winkel’s 1866-system accounts much more adequately for the (temporal) semantic properties of the complements in question. As for the content of the differences between the two types of complements, it will be argued that these can be found in the different ways of matching the indices of the subordinate and the main clauses.

Arnim von Stechow. “Different Approaches To The Semantics Of Comparison”:http://vivaldi.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~arnim10/Lehre/Lublin/Lectures.pdf, Lecture Notes, Lublin, August 2003.

bq. Five lectures on the logical form and semantics of comparative constructions try to give an introduction into the state of the art. The material for the lectures is taken mostly from handouts from talks given by Irene Heim. Irene kindly permitted me to use the material. In addition I have used material from lectures given by Cecile Meier at the ESSLI summer school last year. Cecile gave me her material as well. My only original contribution is a modification of Meier’s semantics for too and enough. [See also the “syllabus”:http://vivaldi.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~arnim10/Lehre/Lublin/index.html for the course.]

Hubert Truckenbrodt. “Die illokutionäre Interpretation der interrogativen Satzformen”:http://www2.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/~hubert/papers/Fragen.pdf. Universität Tübingen, Oktober 2003.

bq. In this paper it is argued that the meaning of a direct question (V2-question in German) is related to the meaning of an embedded question [whether/who … ] by the matrix interpretation ‘The speaker wants that it be common ground [whether/who … ]’. This is a modification of the imperative-epistemic approach of Åqvist and Hintikka. The new element is that the common ground, proposed for assertions by Stalnaker, is also a central element of the interpretation of questions. It is further argued that the inclusion of the common ground in the question interpretation is grammatically conditioned by the presence of the finite verb in C: The German sentence type of matrix verb-final questions is argued to contrast minimally with V2-questions in this regard. The results are embedded in a set of more general hypotheses about the relation of grammatical elements to elements of the illocutionary interpretation. Together, these amount to the claim that grammatical V2 licenses an illocutionary interpretation that crucially involves the listener of a speech act in the illocutionary intention. In the case of epistemic speech acts, involvement of the listener amounts to evaluation relative to the common ground.

Note: the paper itself is in German.

Kent Bach. 2003. “The Emperor’s New ‘Knows’”:http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kbach/contextualism.pdf, to appear in Contextualism in Philosophy: On Epistemology, Language and Truth, Gerhard Preyer and Georg Peter (eds.), Oxford University Press.

[Roughly one half of my UMass colloquium on Friday (”slides”:http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/umass-slides.pdf, “handout”:http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/umass-handout.pdf, “acknowledgments and references”:http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/umass-references.pdf) was spent defending an epistemic conditional analysis of indicative conditionals (the one developed by Angelika Kratzer) — the other half of the talk explored a speech act modifier analysis of epistemic modals. So, it came as a somewhat unsettling surprise to find Kluwer sending me the Table of Contents for the new issue of Philosophical Studies, which contains a lengthy defense of an epistemic conditional analysis of indicative conditionals. I guess I’ll have to work through this paper soon and see what’s left to say.]

Daniel Nolan. 2003. Defending a Possible-Worlds Account of Indicative Conditionals. Philosophical Studies 116 (3): 215-269, December 2003. doi:10.1023/B:PHIL.0000007243.60727.d4.

bq. One very popular kind of semantics for subjunctive conditionals is a closest-worlds account along the lines of theories given by David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker. If we could give the same sort of semantics for indicative conditionals, we would have a more unified account of the meaning of “if … then …” statements, one with many advantages for explaining the behaviour of conditional sentences. Such a treatment of indicative conditionals, however, has faced a battery of objections. This paper outlines a closest-worlds account of indicative conditionals that does better than some of its cousins in explaining the behaviour of such conditionals. The paper then discusses objections offered by Dorothy Edgington and Frank Jackson to closest-worlds accounts of indicative conditionals, and shows that these objections can be met by the account outlined.

My old grad school classmate “Hotze Rullmann”:http://www.ucalgary.ca/%7Erullmann/ has joined the online revolution. His webpage lists many downloadable manuscripts, including these most recent ones:

• Rullmann, Hotze, and Aili You. General Number and the Semantics and Pragmatics of Indefinite Bare Nouns in Mandarin Chinese. Manuscript, December 2003.
• Rullmann, Hotze. To appear. First and Second Person Pronouns as Bound Variables. Linguistic Inquiry.
• Rullmann, Hotze. To appear. A Note on the History of Either. In CLS 38.
• Rullmann, Hotze. 2003. Additive Particles and Polarity. Journal of Semantics 20(4): 329-401.
• Rullmann, Hotze. 2003. Bound-Variable Pronouns and the Semantics of Number. In Brian Agbayani, Paivi Koskinen, and Vida Samiian (eds.) Proceedings of the Western Conference On Linguistics, WECOL 2002, Vol. 14, p. 243-254. Department of Linguistics, California State University, Fresno.

I just came back from a colloquium trip to UMass Amherst. One thing I found out about which had for some inexplicable reason escaped my notice is a new newsletter “What’s happening in South College”:http://people.umass.edu/potts/whisc/. While there are a few things of only local interest to current UMass linguists, most of the content would seem to be relevant for the rest of world as well. Check it out.

Especially the photos in the “December 11″:http://people.umass.edu/potts/whisc/whisc-2003-12-11.html issue from a holiday party on December 10, which featured “a cake decorated with a frosting-image of Barbara Partee’s new book”. Here’s one of the pictures:

Lisa Selkirk cuts the cake while Barbara Partee looks on.

BTW. Barbara’s book Compositionality in Formal Semantics: Selected Papers by Barbara Partee is a must have. And not just for conveniently collecting all her important papers. While I was waiting for my colloquium talk, I got to read the first few pages of what looks like a fabulous personal memoir of the history of linguistic semantics, which appears as an introduction to the book. Unfortunately, the book is not yet available in bookstores (Barbara just got a shipment of advance copies). I hope to pick one up at the “LSA Annual Meeting”:http://www.lsadc.org/2004annmeet/index.html, which takes place in Boston this year.

I am preparing for my colloquium talk at UMass on Friday (yes, I am an incorrigible procrastinator). To this purpose, I am re-reading the two papers on epistemic modality that I “pointed to”:http://semantics-online.org/2003/11/epistemicmodalityfest a while back. One of the puzzles discussed in these papers concerns dialogues such as these (from MacFarlane’s paper):

bq. Sally: Joe might be in Boston. George: He can’t be in Boston. I saw him in the hall five minutes ago. Sally: Oh, then I guess I was wrong.

Sally’s retraction of her might-statement is unexpected from a somewhat standard subjective semantics for epistemic modals. where might p means something like it is compatible with what I know that p. And in MacFarlane’s paper and in Egan-Hawthorne-Weatherson’s paper, we find new proposals designed to explain Sally’s response (among other new facts).

I was hoping my readers could help me with judging the following dialogue (re-using material from “DeRose’s 1991 paper on epistemic possibility”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8108%28199110%29100%3A4%3C581%3AEP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-4):

bq. Sally: Joe might have cancer. He has some of the symptoms. But it’s by no means certain that he’s got it. We’ve gone to the doctor and they’ve run a test on him which may rule cancer out. [On Monday the test results come in. Joe does not have cancer.] Sally: Thank God. We were wrong when we thought Joe might have cancer.

I am especially interested in whether there are people who find Sally’s retraction in the second dialogue less natural than the one in the first dialogue. Feel free to play around with wording etc. Use the comments, if you’d like. Thanks.

Some “rough notes on epistemic modals”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/epistemic-lastclass.pdf for today’s last class are available. I will give a colloquium at UMass on Friday where a hopefully more polished version including some of this material will be used. I will post my slides on my homepage.

A short list of indefinite references is “available”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/indef-refs.pdf. Danny Fox’s handout on “Long Distance Indefinites” from last fall’s pragmatics course is also “available”:http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/fox.ldindefhandout.pdf.

For the last class of the semester (next Tuesday), please take a look at the following paper:

MacFarlane, John: 2003. “Epistemic Modalities and Relative Truth”:http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jmacf/epistmod.pdf.

Tomorrow, we’ll spend some more time on indefinites and perhaps already resume our discussion of epistemic modals.

Richard Breheny (2003) “On Bindability”:http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~reb35/on%20bindability.pdf, Proceedings of AC 2003.

bq. Bindability is the ability of an expression to have its interpretation fixed relative to elements in a scopally superior quantificational expression’s domain. There seems to be a bindability generalisation: if context-dependent, then bindable. Two better known accounts of context dependence and bindability are critically considered: the ‘hidden variables’ and ‘presuppositional’ approaches. A third account involving coercive lexical mechanisms in a variable-free framework will be offered. The ‘bindability generalisation’ will be reconsidered in the light of this proposal.

Richard Breheny (2003) A Lexical Account of Implicit (Bound) Contextual Dependence, To appear in SALT XIII Proceedings.

bq. This paper examines some familiar issues concerning implicit contextual restriction. In particular, it considers how the interpretation of expressions such as quantified noun phrases is not determined by explicit material solely and how these expressions get to be implicitly bound-into. … It will be argued here that a variable-free treatment is best suited to handle the full range of data considered.

Richard Breheny (forthcoming) “Pragmatic Analyses of Anaphoric Pronouns: Do Things Look Better in 2-D?”:http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~reb35/anaphors%20in%202D.pdf To appear in M. Garcia-Carpentero & J. Macia edited book on Two-Dimensionalism for OUP. {A slightly revised version of the S&B VI paper}.

bq. This paper compares pragmatic accounts of anaphoric relations between indefinites and pronouns. We argue that Stalnaker’s (1998) account which exploits features of his two dimensional framework for representing context and content is too weak. We suggest that the definiteness of anaphoric pronouns can be captured only if we consider them E-type.

Richard Breheny (forthcoming) “Indefinites and Anaphoric Dependence — A Case for Dynamic Semantics or Pragmatics?”:http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~reb35/indefs%20&%20anaphora.pdf To appear in M Reimer and A Bezuidenhout (eds) Descriptions and Beyond, OUP.

bq. The significantly new idea behind dynamic semantics is that semantic facts derive ultimately from the effect expressions in a language have on utterance processing. On this view, although folk may talk and think about discourse in terms of the actions of agents, such pragmatic notions do not find their way into this cognitive account of meaning. The anaphoric relation between indefinites and pronouns has always provided one of the major empirical supports for dynamic semantics. In this paper, I have tried to give something of the current box score with regards to whether the dynamic approach or a more traditional E-type approach provides better empirical coverage. I have also tried to provide motivation for the more telling point against the dynamic paradigm which is that our conceptualisation of utterances as grounded action does have a bearing on semantic facts.
On the positive side, I have tried to address the accessibility problem for pragmatic E-type accounts. This was motivated by a situation-theoretic/relevance theoretic approach to pragmatics. This account adds a processing dimension to the non-dynamic notion of accessibility by having relevance (and hence cognitive processing) considerations determine the focus of attention in cases where utterances provide the context for other utterances.

Henk Zeevat (2003) “The Syntax Semantics Interface of Speech Act Markers”:http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/diabruck/submissionfinals/papers/137/paper137.ps. In Proceedings Diabruck, 7th Workshop on the Semantics and the Pragmatics of Dialogue, Wallerfangen.

bq. The paper proposes a semantics for speech acts as a generalisation of update semantics and an account of the meaning of speech act markers where they are default resetting devices. The speech act marker works on specific parameters of a given speech act and defines new valus for them.

All the “accepted papers”:http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/diabruck/pages/acceptedpapers.htm at Diabruck: 7th workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue, Sept 4th-6th 2003 are online. The Corblin paper “just mentioned”:http://semantics-online.org/2003/12/corblinon_presuppositions is one of them. I’ll highlight some more.