Comments on: Essential Readings in Semantics

By: Chris Potts

Chris Potts — Tue, 30 Dec 2003 18:22:07 +0000

I share Kai's concerns about having books and dissertations on this list. If they are truly worth a spot, then they demand many months with furrowed brows. So here are replacements for two of the long items on my earlier list:

Beaver, David Ian. 1997. Presupposition. In Johan van Benthem and Alice ter Meulen, eds., Handbook of Logic and Language, 939--1008. Cambridge, MA and Amsterdam: MIT Press and North-Holland.

a first-rate primer for Gazdar, Karttunen, Heim,

van der Sandt, and others

Gunlogson, Christine. 2002. Declarative questions. In Brendan Jackson, ed., Proceedings of SALT 12. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications.

the essence of her dissertation

By: Luis Alonso-Ovalle

Luis Alonso-Ovalle — Tue, 30 Dec 2003 02:15:30 +0000

Dear Kai,

Nice post.

Why not Kratzer’s contribution on conditionals (and modality ?) on the handbook edited by Wunderlich and von Stechow? It’s far more succint than “The Notional …” Are we just focusing on original work (as opposed to handbook-type) ?

By: Kai von Fintel

Kai von Fintel — Sun, 21 Dec 2003 20:09:29 +0000

Thanks for the suggestions, on most of which I completely agree.

But we can't add to the list indefinitely! My idea is that these are the essential readings that a semanticist should read in the first three years of graduate work. On top of that, they will be reading work in other areas and cutting edge work on their generals paper topic and on other specific interests. So, we can't make the list too long.

Nevertheless, I think I will add most of your well-chosen suggestions to my list. (I am somewhat wary of books and dissertations because of their length).

By: Chris Potts

Chris Potts — Sun, 21 Dec 2003 19:33:11 +0000

Well, maybe I live in the burning present along with the physicists: the things that come to mind as potential additions to Kai's preliminary list are all new(ish) and

(i) beautiful; or (ii) already having a huge impact.

Happily, most have properties (i) and (ii).

CONTEXT-DEPENDENCY von Fintel, Kai. 1999. NPI licensing, Strawson-entailment, and context-dependency. Journal of Semantics, 16(2):97-148.

CROSS-LINGUISTIC SEMANTICS Bittner, Maria. 1994. Cross-linguistic semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 17(1):53-108.

DYNAMICS Dekker, Paul. 1993. Existential disclosure. Linguistics and Philosophy 16(6):561-587.

INDEXICALS Schlenker, Philippe. 2003. A plea for monsters. Linguistics and Philosophy 26(1):29-120.

INTONATIONAL MEANING Buering, Daniel. 1999. Topic. In Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt, eds., Focus --- Linguistic, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, 142--165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gunlogson, Christine. 2001. True to Form: Rising and Falling Declaratives as Questions in English. PhD thesis, UC Santa Cruz.

PRESUPPOSITIONS Beaver, David Ian. 2001. Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics. Stanford, CA: CSLI

QUANTIFICATION von Fintel, Kai. 1994. Restrictions on Quantifier Domains. PhD thesis, UMass Amherst. Published by the GLSA.

Jacobson, Pauline. 1999. Towards a variable-free semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 22(2):117-184.

I could add to this list indefinitely.