This course is the second of the three parts of our graduate introduction to semantics. The others are 24.970 Introduction to Semantics and 24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory. Like the other courses, this one is not meant as an overview of the field and its current developments. Our aim is to help you develop the ability for semantic analysis, and we think that exploring a few topics in detail together with hands-on practical work is more effective than offering a bird’s-eye view of everything. This time around, we will work on three sets of topics: (1) modality, conditionals, scope in modal contexts, (2) tense, events, time adverbials, (3) indefinites, generics, adverbial quantification.
Prerequisites: I will presuppose the material in chapters 1–8 of Heim & Kratzer, basic familiarity with Predicate Logic, and some syntax (wh-movement, raising and control, Binding Theory). If you have not completed 24.970, please talk to me before you enroll (or commit yourself to staying enrolled).
A more detailed “syllabus”:http://semantics-online.org/advsem/syllabus.pdf can be downloaded.
[from the "Linguist List":http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-286.html]
bq. Zeno Vendler died of kidney failure on January 13, 2004, while on an extended stay with family in Hungary. He was 82, and had retired earlier from UCSD. He also taught at Cornell, Brooklyn College, and the University of Calgary, where he was a founding member of the philosophy department.”
Vendler is well-known among linguists, most notably through two early works: “Each and every, any and all,” and “verbs and times.” The first is an analysis of subtle differences among four English words that correspond to universal quantifiers in logic. The second concerns the often subtle effects of verb expressions on aspectual interpretation of sentences; the two terms Vendler introduced in the discussion of this topic area; “achievement” and “accomplishment,” have since become basic technical vocabulary in modern linguistics. Both of these works have been extremely influential and have served as sources for the later development of sophisticated and highly technical treatments of their respective topic areas. It may also be noted that Vendler’s work on the order of prenominal modifiers provides a precursor to theories of parsing.
See also the “obituary at the Calgary philosophy website”:http://www.phil.ucalgary.ca/people/vendler.html.
[alerted by David Pesetsky]
The BBC has a piece on N’kisi, an African grey parrot, who “has a vocabulary of 950 words, and shows signs of a sense of humour. … He invents his own words and phrases if he is confronted with novel ideas with which his existing repertoire cannot cope — just as a human child would do. N’kisi’s remarkable abilities, which are said to include telepathy, feature in the latest BBC Wildlife Magazine. N’kisi is believed to be one of the most advanced users of human language in the animal world.”
A quick Google search reveals that years ago, the parrot was the subject of a “USA Today article”:http://www.usatoday.com/life/2001-02-12-parrot.htm, particulary about his psychic abilities. See “this message”:http://www.csicop.org/list/listarchive/msg00168.html from CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.
N’kisi’s homepage describes some experiments. Apparently none of this has been published in any scientific journal. I don’t know what the BBC means by the teaser line “The finding of a parrot with an almost unparalleled power to communicate with people has brought scientists up short.”
Update: Mark Liberman now has an “entry”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000398.html on Language Log on the parrot as well, mostly about the ludicrous claim in the BBC article that “About 100 words are needed for half of all reading in English, so if N’kisi could read he would be able to cope with a wide range of material.”
Reader Antonio Marmo writes with a request:
bq. I do miss a paraconsistent approach of natural language semantics. This is a branch of logic that, more than 30 years after it started, has grown for the last 12 years. My question to you is whether you know some linguists working with these ideas in formal linguistics. I have browsed the web and could not find anyone yet.
I have to say that I have not really run across any work in linguistic semantics which employs “paraconsistent logic”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-paraconsistent/. The only paper dealing with it that I myself ever read was David Lewis’ “Logic for Equivocators” (Noûs 16 (1982), pp 431–441), which is reprinted in his “Papers in Philosophical Logic”:http://tinyurl.com/2asxg. Other promising places to check out are Greg Restall’s list of publications and an interesting looking paper by Achille Varzi: “Inconsistency Without Contradiction”, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 38:4 (1997), 621–638 (”preprint pdf”:http://www.columbia.edu/~av72/papers/Ndjfl_1997.pdf).
But of course these are all references in the realm of philosophy. As I said, I don’t know of any specifically linguistic work in this area, although it would seem that especially in the area of propositional attitude semantics, we all have to deal with the fact that real people hold inconsistent beliefs without having their brains suffer the kind of melt-down supercomputing intelligences on Star Trek usually experience when Captain Kirk feeds them contradictory statements.
My suspicion is that most of us imagine that we can get away with having the semantics presuppose a consistent belief state and appealing to mechanisms like paraconsistent logic or supervaluation strategies to explain how attitude descriptions manage to be at least sort of true of actual people. At some point, I thought about using something like paraconsistent logic directly in the semantics for desire predicates, where it seems more of a stretch to presuppose consistency. But I never pursued this line in any detail.
Anyway, if anyone has a pointer to linguistic semantic work employing paraconsistent logics or relatives thereof, please let us know in the comments. Antonio (and I) would be grateful.
“Indefinites and Weak Quantifiers”:http://bkl-www.uia.ac.be/bkl/en/coll2004.htm. Brussels, 6–8 January 2005.
The deadline for abstracts submission is April 30th, 2004. Authors will be notified before July 1st 2004.
bq. The aim of the conference is to make a contribution to the study of plural indefinites. This involves, on the one hand, the specific properties of plural indefinites which distinguish them from singular indefinites; on the other hand, the expression of indefiniteness by means of weak quantifiers, also known as indefinite, intersective, symmetric, existential or cardinal quantifiers (e.g. two, some, several, many, etc.).
The recent literature on plural indefinites and weak quantifiers contains a number of hypotheses which deserve closer investigation. These include the following — among others:
- The relationship between determination and quantification in the indefinite domain. Are weak quantifiers determiners? How does the distinction tie in with the hypothesis that Quantifier Phrases generate Determiner Phrases (QP –> Q [DET + NP]) (Matthewson 2001)?
- Bare plurals and their relationship with other indefinites:
- Given that bare plurals in Germanic languages allow generic readings, do they really qualify as indefinites? Or should the Romance generic definites rather be considered to have an indefinite behaviour (Krifka 1995)?
- Arguments for or against (i) Carlsonian (Carlson 1977) and Neocarlsonian (Chierchia 1998) approaches to bare plurals in terms of names of kinds; (ii) approaches in terms of properties (Dobrovie-Sorin & Laca 2003) and incorporation (Van Geenhoven 1996, McNally 1998).
- phenomenon of “excorporation”, the scope of the indefinites and strong existential readings (reference to individuals) and weak existential readings (reference to properties). What is the influence of the modifiers (adjectives, relatives) on the reading of indefinites? Is there a relationship between on the one hand these two readings of indefinites, and on the other hand referential readings of weak quantifiers (reference to individuals) and quantificational readings (reference to quantities) (Fodor and Sag 1982, Szabolcsi 1997)?
- Ambiguities of the weak quantifiers:
- Weak (indefinite) readings vs proportional (partitive, strong) readings. Is the indefinite meaning of weak quantifiers preserved when they have a proportional or partitive reading (Kleiber 2001)?
- Referential vs quantificational readings.
- Collective readings (quantification over individuals) vs distributive readings (quantification over events).
- What is involved in the difference between adjectival quantifiers (many N) and adverbial quantifiers (beaucoup de N)? What is the function of Genitive case, be it prepositional or morphological, in weak quantification
The conference is open to the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic approaches. Perspectives that account for cross-linguistic variation are strongly encouraged.
At Language Log, Chris Potts has a post on negatives that seem superfluous, in that with or without them the sentence seems to mean the same. Mark Liberman adds to this a naturally occurring example he found:
I challenge anyone to refute that the company is not the most efficient producer in North America.
Mark asks “Is this a case where the force of the sentence is logically the same with or without the extra not? Or did Mr. Duffy just get confused?”
I would certainly lean towards the latter explanation. But it’s quite well-known that it is hard not to be confused. The coolest case I know is this:
No head injury is too trivial to ignore.
[Think about it.]
I believe it was brought into the literature by Wason and Reich:
Wason, P. C., and Reich, S. S., “A Verbal Illusion,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 31 (1979): 591-97.
It was supposedly found on the wall of a London hospital. Actually, a Google search suggests that the ultimate source of the quote is Hippocrates (460–377 BC). By the way, a number of the Google hits seem to come from sites run by injury lawyers. Also by the way, the full quote appears to be “No head injury is too severe to despair of, nor too trivial to ignore”, which is even more mind-boggling, at least for my poor little brain.
I recall that Higginbotham discusses the example somewhere. I’ll try to find the reference when I have time.
The journal Theoretical Linguistics, under the new editorship of Manfred Krifka, is now an open peer review journal. Currently, one of the target articles is a paper on focus by Geurts and van der Sandt. Review articles are now appearing in prepublication form on the web. [I was also asked to contribute but can't wrap my head around the issues at the moment, quite apart from having no time for it. I am certain that the other experts will say everything that needs to be said.] Here is the target article and the reviews that I have come across:
[via "Language Log":http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000345.html]
There’s a new linguistics blog called “Semantic Compositions”:http://semanticcompositions.typepad.com/ by an author who prefers to remain anonymous for now.
bq. Your host is a commercially employed computational linguist with an undergraduate degree in linguistics, a graduate degree in computational linguistics, and additional training in electrical engineering and music. He also holds a patent in search engine design, and as of this writing, has a further patent pending for a related natural-language parser design. [from the "inaugural post":http://semanticcompositions.typepad.com/index/2004/01/initial_composi.html]
Manfred Krifka. “Quantifiers in Questions”:http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/QuantifiersInQuestionsKorea.pdf. Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics 3 (2003), 499-526.
bq. This talk is based on Krifka (2001). Its topic is the interpretation of quantifiers in questions. I will use English data for illustration, but the phenomena to be discussed appear to be general enough to be relevant for other languages as well, at least those languages that have nominal quantifiers.
[...]
In this talk, I have argued that quantification into question acts is possible for universal quantifiers, as these quantifiers are based on conjunction, an operation that is defined for speech acts. This explains the restriction to universal quantifiers, which are generalized conjunctions. I have developed a type system in which quantification into question acts can be described. I have argued that expressions that scope out of speech acts must be topic, which explains a number of additional observations. I have also discussed embedded questions, which, depending on the embedding verb, may allow for quantification into questions.
Needless to say, much still has to be done. In particular, a comprehensive formal theory of speech acts in which they are treated as acts, and not as descriptions of acts with Boolean properties, has to be developed, and a theory that captures the way how such acts can be integrated within recursive, Boolean semantics.
Richard Larson. 2004. “The Projection of DP”:http://semlab5.sbs.sunysb.edu/~rlarson/dphandout.pdf. Paper presented at the University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany, January 15, 2004.
bq. The resulting picture is one in which DP is much more analogous to VP than to TP or CP (by far the most common view).
Martina Faller. (to appear). “Propositional- and illocutionary-level evidentiality in Cuzco Quechua”:http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/Info/staff/MTF/sula2.pdf. In: Jan Anderssen, Paula Menendez-Benito, and Adam Werle (eds.) Proceedings of SULA2, The Semantics of Under-Represented Languages in the Americas. Amherst: The Graduate Linguistics Students’ Association The University of Massachusetts.
bq. This paper discusses the differences between two grammatical means of conveying evidential contrasts in Cuzco Quechua, and argues that evidential interpretations can arise on different levels of meaning.
Claudia Maienborn. “A Pragmatic Explanation of the Stage Level/Individual Level Contrast in Combination with Locatives”:http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h0594bbb/pdf-files/2004-WECOL.pdf. To appear in B. Tucker (ed.), WECOL 2003 Proceedings, Tucson.
bq. One important difference between stage level predicates (SLPs) and individual level predicates (ILPs) is their behavior with respect to locative modifiers. It is commonly assumed that SLPs but not ILPs combine with locatives. The present study argues against a semantic account for this behavior (as advanced by e.g. Kratzer 1995, Chierchia 1995) and proposes a genuinely pragmatic explanation of the observed stage level/individual level contrast instead. The proposal is spelled out using Blutner’s (1998, 2000) optimality theoretic version of the Gricean maxims. Building on the observation that the respective locatives are not event-related but frame-setting modifiers, the preference for main predicates that express temporary properties is explained as a side-effect of “synchronizing” the main predicate with the locative frame in the course of finding an optimal interpretation. By emphasizing the division of labor between grammar and pragmatics, the proposed solution takes a considerable load off of semantics.
Zoltán Gendler Szabó. “The Distinction between Semantics and Pragmatics”:http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/zs15/SemanticsPragmatics.pdf. Draft, 9 January 2004 - Comments welcomed.
bq. This is a general survey about the way the distinction between semantics and prgmatics has been drawn in the litrature and a proposal to draw it slightly differently. It is to appear in E. Lepore and B. Smith eds., The Oxford Handbook of Philsophy of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Johan van Benthem. “A Mini-Guide to Logic In Action”:http://www.illc.uva.nl/Publications/ResearchReports/PP-2004-02.text.pdf. December 2003. Amsterdam & Stanford.
bq. Abstract: The Dynamic Turn in logic makes actions of communication and general information update into explicit objects of investigation. This paper is a brief tour of this research program in a new version, bringing together ideas from logic, philosophy, computer science, and game theory. In particular, we discuss epistemic, dynamic, and temporal logics, belief revision, and game logics.
“Maria Aloni”:http://www.xs4all.nl/~wander/aloni/. “Individual Concepts in Modal Predicate Logic”:http://www.xs4all.nl/~wander/aloni/jop/jop.pdf. To appear in Journal of Philosophical Logic.
bq. Suppose (1a) is true and (1b) is false. What is the truth value of (1c) under the assignment that maps the variable x to the individual which is Cicero and Tully?
(1) a. Philip is unaware that Tully denounced Catiline.
b. Philip is unaware that Cicero denounced Catiline.
c. Philip is unaware that x denounced Catiline.
After 50 years, this question from Quine is still puzzling logicians, linguists and philosophers. In the present article, this and other paradoxes of de re propositional attitude reports are discussed in the framework of modal predicate logic. In the first part of the article, I compare different reactions to these paradoxes and I argue in favor of an analysis in which evaluations of attitude reports are relativized to the ways of identifying objects used in the specific circumstances of an utterance. The insight that different methods of identification are available and can be used in different contexts is not new in the logical-philosophical literature and it is also not without problems. In the second part of the article, I give this insight a precise formalization, which in the same go solves the associated problems.
A worthwhile read for academic job seekers from “Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/, even in fields other than Law and Philosophy (which is what Leiter focuses on):
- Part 1: How long should a job candidate have to respond to an offer of a job? What should I be finding out about the job before accepting?
- Part 2: How do I prepare for a campus visit, and what information should I get from the school where I’m interviewing? Suppose my spouse/partner is also seeking an academic job. Is it appropriate to raise that issue with the schools interviewing me, and if so, when? What should I be looking for from these schools?
“Francesca Del Gobbo”:http://venus.unive.it/fdelgobb/. 2003. “Appositives at the Interface”:http://venus.unive.it/~fdelgobb/DelGobbodissertation.pdf. PhD Dissertation. UC Irvine. (Advisor: C.-T. James Huang).
bq. Appositive relative clauses have contradictory properties. For certain aspects they seem to be separate from their antecedent and from the matrix clause; for others they seem to form a constituent with their antecedent. This dissertation provides a solution to the described paradox.
Following Sells (1985a,b) and Demirdache (1991), I claim that appositives are an instance of E-type anaphora. I adopt an approach to E-type anaphora that is both grammatical (Heim 1990) and pragmatic (Cooper 1979, Heim and Kratzer 1998). In order to account for the properties of appositive relative clauses, we need to represent them as nominal modifiers in syntax and as independent sentences at the level of discourse. This is obtained by postulating a rule for the interpretation of the appositive relative pronoun as an E-type pronoun (the PRONOUN RULE) and a rule that transforms the appositive relative clause into a matrix clause under a Text node (the RESTRUCTURING RULE). The Restructuring Rule modifies the hierarchical structure of a sentence without altering its linear order and applies before Spell-Out. Its LF counterpart is TEXT FORMATION (see Heim 1982). The interaction of the postulated rules makes the following predictions: No prenominal relatives can be interpreted as appositive; and appositive relative clauses can modify quantified ‘heads’, as long as they occur in sentence-final position. These predictions are fulfilled by facts observed both in Chinese and in English.
Finally, I provide an explanation for the availability of restrictive relative clauses modifying referential names in Chinese. In most cases, these relatives are interpreted as modifying not the individual denoted by the proper name or the pronoun, but ’stages’ of it. Following Paul (1994), I assume that the ’stage’ of an individual is interpreted as a property of the same. The relative clause combines with the ’stage’ by Intersective Predicate Modification. For those cases that are resistant to a ’stage’ interpretation, I adopt the nonsaturating operation Restrict (Chung and Ladusaw, to appear) by allowing it to apply to nominals of type e.
In sum, my theory provides a formal tool for characterizing appositive relative clauses as a phenomenon spanning between syntax, semantics and discourse.
William Lycan. “On a Defense of the Truth-Condition Theory of Meaning”:http://www.unc.edu/%7Eujanel/TCSDEFexp.htm. (draft).
bq. My concern in this paper is with sentence-meaning, and with a certain sort of argument for the Truth-Condition theory of sentence-meaning.The argument is intended to establish that sentence-meaning is at least truth-condition, whether or not other features such as force (or “conceptual role” or implicatures) also deserve to be included as part of “meaning.”In particular, I shall confront the argument with some objections suggested by recent “use” theories.
“Shoecabbage”:http://www.ucomics.com/shoecabbage/ is a new syndicated comic (appearing three times a week) that revolves around “shoecabbages”. According to the website,
bq. A “shoecabbage” is a word in another language with the same sound as a word in English but with a different meaning. For example, in English a “shoe” is a covering for a foot, while in French “shoe” [spelled: chou] means “cabbage”.
The “press release”:http://www.amuniversal.com/ups/newsrelease/?view=73 for the comic cites several prominent linguists who support the idea, among them a colleague of mine:
bq. Adds Norvin Richards, a linguist at MIT: “It’s a real pleasure to see a feature like this that celebrates language…”
(What’s with the ellipsis in the quote, Norvin?)
Here is an example cartoon, actually suggested by Norvin to Teresa Dowlatshahi, the author of the cartoon:
[Thanks to the Audhumlan Conspiracy for the tip. And thanks to Teresa Dowlatshahi for permission to use the Lardil cartoon.]
David Beaver. Five only pieces. to appear. Theoretical Linguistics.
bq. This article is a discussion of Bart Geurts and Rob van der Sandt’s “Interpreting Focus.” The discussion is divided into five pieces, each tackling a different aspect of their analysis, particularly as it applies to the exclusive only.
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