Semantics etc.

Miyuki Sawada and Richard K. Larson: “Presupposition & root transforms in adjunct clauses”:http://semlab5.sbs.sunysb.edu/~rlarson/sawada_larson.pdf. to appear in Proceedings of NELS 34, GLSA, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

bq. In this paper, we have that proposed that Hopper & Thompson’s striking correlation between presupposition and the availability of root transformations in adjunct clauses is essentially an artifact of semantics, and its projection into syntax. Specifically, using the semantics for adverbials proposed by Johnston (1994) we have explored the following claims:

• Temporal connectives combine with open event sentences, yielding interval descriptions.
• These restrict (covert or overt) adverbial quantifiers and are presupposed.
• Causal connectives combine with closed event sentences, do not restrict adverbial quantifiers, and are not presupposed.

Closed event sentences are semantically and syntactically “larger” than open ones, and the larger syntactic domain of causal adjuncts makes room for root transforms. We briefly reviewed some independent syntactic evidence that such a “size difference” does indeed exist.

Richard K. Larson and Franc Marusic: “On Indefinite Pronoun Structures with APs: Reply to Kishimoto”:http://semlab5.sbs.sunysb.edu/~rlarson/larsonmarusic.pdf, to appear in Linguistic Inquiry.

bq. A number of authors have claimed that indefinite pronoun constructions like everything red are formed by raising a noun (thing) over a higher prenominal adjective (red). We examine phenomena in English and other languages which appear to show that adjectives participating in the indefinite pronoun construction do not correspond to prenominal forms, but to postnominal ones. we evaluate the challenges these results present for the N-raising account, showing that while some can be met, others apparently cannot. This outcome calls for a reexamination of postnominal position with indefinite pronouns.

I know little about the semantics job market this year for some reason. In philosophy of language, job gossip (at least at the senior level) is thankfully more public:

• The Chronicle of Higher Education had “a brief item”:http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v50/i25/25a00901.htm in the Feb 27, 2004 edition about USC’s efforts to upgrade its philosophy department:

bq. RISING IN THE WEST: The University of Southern California’s philosophy department is trying to lure several prominent professors from around the country in an attempt to elevate its national reputation. “We want to be a major graduate program in certain specialties,” says James Higginbotham, chairman of the department.
Scott Soames, 58, a leading figure in the philosophy of language, who has been at Princeton University for more than two decades, is weighing an offer from Southern Cal. “It’s in a process of upgrading itself,” says Mr. Soames, who adds that the USC department has been good but is moving toward “truly outstanding” in several areas.
Mr. Soames, who will be getting married this summer, says he and his fiancée, a newspaper reporter, would love to move to sunny California, but he is torn by an attractive counteroffer from Princeton. The philosophy department there “has taken some very important hits,” he acknowledges, referring to the death in 2001 of the analytical philosopher David Lewis and the departure of another colleague, Saul Kripke.
[...] The university is also trying to persuade Jeffrey C. King, another philosopher of language, to leave the University of California at Davis. Mr. King did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

• Today, “Brian Leiter”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/bleiter/ reports that “Scott Soames is in fact going from Princeton to USC”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000861.html.
• Brian Weatherson “announced”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002542.html on his own blog that he is going to Cornell.
• Yet to be resolved (apart from Jeff King’s posssible move to USC) is Jason Stanley’s offer from Rutgers.

The USC moves (Soames and possibly King) are quite significant. As Brian Leiter writes: “With James Higginbotham already at USC, the addition of Soames … makes USC one of the top choices in the country for students interested in philosophy of language — even more so if King comes as well.” One should also note that there are some top flight semanticists at USC: Barry Schein, Elena Guerzoni, Roumy Pancheva, and Bridget Copley.

“Christopher Potts”:http://people.umass.edu/potts/. 2004. “The dimensions of quotation”:http://people.umass.edu/potts/potts-brown-paper-quotation.pdf. To appear in Chris Barker and Pauline Jacobson, eds., Proceedings of the Workshop on Direct Compositionality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

bq. Natural languages are rich in words and constructions for talking about natural language: property-denoting expressions like alliterative, sentences like Ed’s answer was “yes”, and a range of devices for reporting quotations and objecting to speakers’ words and pronunciations. This paper provides a grammar for this domain of natural language. The grammar meets all the technical and intuitive requirements for being directly compositional.

“Jason Stanley”:http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jasoncs/ has posted a draft of his paper on contextualism about knowledge attributions:

• Jason Stanley: 2004. Context, Interest-Relativity, and Knowledge.

bq. This is a paper I’ve been working on for a while. It descends from “On the Case for Contextualism”, a paper I gave at the 2002 UMass Conference on contextualism in epistemology. I’ve given some version of this at a number of places, and I don’t expect it to change drastically between now and publication. So I figured I’d just post it, in the hopes that this will help me get away from working on it all the time. Enjoy.

The “2004 Milan Meeting”:http://filosofia.dipafilo.unimi.it/~zucchi/MM2004.html is a conference on Covert Variables at Logical Form, held at Palazzo Feltrinelli in Gargnano, on Lake Garda, June 10 — 12, 2004. Invited speakers are: Angelika Kratzer, François Recanati, Mats Rooth, Jason Stanley. There is space for 10 contributed talks of 30 minutes each (plus a discussion of 15 minutes). The deadline for submission of abstracts is April 17th, 2004.

While I certainly traffic a lot in covert variables at logical form, I don’t have any new foundational thoughts about them. But really, look at the pictures on the website. Surely, you can dig up some interesting ideas, just so you can visit that palazzo?

“Reinhard Blutner”:http://www.blutner.de/ has a handout on free choice permission and disjunction that I hadn’t seen before:

• Free Choice Permission: Global and Local Approaches. Talk at ZAS (Berlin), May 16th, 2003.

“Michael Glanzberg”:http://individual.utoronto.ca/glanz/ has some interesting papers online:

• Focus: A Case Study on the Semantics/Pragmatics Boundary (to appear in Z. Szabo (ed) Semantics vs. Pragmatics, Oxford University Press)
• Presuppositions, Truth Values, and Expressing Propositions (forthcoming in Contextualism in Philosophy: On Epistemology, Language, and Truth, ed. G. Pryer and G. Peter, Oxford University Press)

A couple of pages of comments on the first homework are now “available”:http://semantics-online.org/advsem/solution1.pdf

Chapter 3 “Modality” of the lecture notes is now “available”:http://semantics-online.org/advsem/3.Modals.pdf.

I have a question for those of my readers who know more than I do about deontic logic. I take it that it is a feature of the standard semantics for dyadic deontic ought that the following is a logical truth: “given that A, A ought to be the case”. Roughly, this is because the sentence would be asserting that among the A-worlds, the best ones are all A-worlds, which they have to be since among the A-worlds, there are of course only A-worlds.

Frank Jackson (in his 1985 paper “On the Semantics and Logic of Obligation”, Mind, 94:374, 177–195) sees this as a defect in the standard systems and puts forward an alternative analysis that does not make O(A/A) a logical truth.

The problem has recently been “discovered” in the semantics literature, in particular in Anette Frank’s 1997 dissertation Context Dependence in Modal Constructions and in Zsófia Zvolensky’s SALT 12 (2002) paper: “Is a Possible-Worlds Semantics of Modality Possible? A Problem for Kratzer’s Semantics”:http://web.gc.cuny.edu/Linguistics/liba/papers/zsolenszky.pdf.

I am going to be talking about the problem in our “modality seminar”:http://semantics-online.org/topics04/ on Thursday.

I have not been able to find discussion of the problem in the deontic logic literature beyond (and before) the Jackson paper. My question to the experts (and amateurs): where has this problem been acknowledged and discussed?

“Emar Maier”:http://www.phil.kun.nl/tfl/~emar/ has a couple of handouts on monstrous indexicals and quotation:

• “Monstrous Quotation”:http://www.phil.kun.nl/tfl/~emar/quotehandout.pdf
• “Ancient Greek Monsters”:http://www.phil.kun.nl/tfl/~emar//monstertest.pdf (with Corien Bary)

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 available in prepublication form. Here is the target article and now all the reviews:

• Target: Bart Geurts and Rob van der Sandt. “Interpreting Focus”:http://www.kun.nl/phil/tfl/bart/papers/focus.pdf.
• Reviews:
  1. David Beaver. Five only pieces.
  2. Daniel Büring. “Focus Suppositions”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/mZkNmU5O/Buring.FocusSuppositions.04.pdf.
  3. Regine Eckardt: Comments on Geurts and van der Sandt.
  4. Jean Mark Gawron: Comments on Geurts and van der Sandt.
  5. Joachim Jacobs: Focus, Presuppositions, and Discourse Restrictions.
  6. Gerhard Jäger. Alternatives or presuppositions? A comparison of the Background-Presupposition Rule with Alternative Semantics.
  7. Angelika Kratzer. Interpreting Focus: Presupposed or Expressive Meanings?
  8. Roger Schwarzschild. Focus Interpretations.

I am certain that all of the authors would appreciate feedback. I know that I will be talking about only in our current “semantics seminar”:http://semantics-online.org/topics04, so I will likely have something to say about some of the issues as well.

[Thanks to Regine Eckardt, Jean Mark Gawron, Joachim Jacobs, and Roger Schwarzschild for letting me host their contributions. Thanks to Bart Geurts for facilitating this. The other contributions are available from the authors' websites or the "Semantics Archive":http://semanticsarchive.net. ]

A rather rough draft of “Chapter 2 on Propositional Attitudes”:http://semantics-online.org/advsem/2.Attitudes.pdf is now available. I will hand out a printout in class tomorrow. The homework for next week (due on Thursday, because there is no class on Tuesday) is Exercise 2.1 on p. 17.

In a fascinating front page article in today’s Boston Globe, Carey Goldberg tells “the story”:http://tinyurl.com/3hhjs of how Dr. Vikas Sukhatme and Dr. S. Ananth Karumanchi at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center figured out what seems to be a major piece of the puzzle in the fight against preeclampsia, “a long-baffling syndrome that kills an estimated 76,000 mothers worldwide each year”. The description of the science involved and the serendipity of discovery and the role of intuition is very nice.

What struck me was here we have a prime example of the importance of medical research relying on knowledge of genetics and genetic variation. At the same time once again, school boards and commissioners in various parts of the nation are trying to keep biology teachers from teaching evolution and genetics. For excellent coverage, see Paul Z. Myers’ site “Pharyngula”:http://pharyngula.org/.

I guess the US is lucky that it can still attract scientists like Dr. Karumanchi, who was trained in India (where one supposes science teachers are not subject to interference from religious fanatics).

Here are some references related to stuff that arose today in class.

Kripke’s most important nontechnical work on possible worlds semantics is:

• Kripke, Saul A.: 1980. Naming and Necessity. Harvard University Press. previously printed (except for the preface) in Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman (eds.), Semantics for Natural Language, Reidel, 1972, pp. 253–355.

Musan discusses existence-independent predicates like famous in:

• Musan, Renate: 1997. “Tense, Predicates, and Lifetime Effects”. Natural Language Semantics 5(3), 271–301. doi:10.1023/A:1008281017969.

Inconsistencies in fictions and elsewhere are discussed in:

• Varzi, Achille: 1997. “Inconsistency Without Contradiction”. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 38(4), 621–638. preprint.

See also:

• Lewis, David: 1982. “Logic for Equivocators”. Noûs 16, 431–441. Reprinted in David Lewis: 1998. Papers in Philosophical Logic. Cambridge University Press, pp. 97–110.

None of these are essential readings for this class, but Kripke is a classic that one should read at some point and Musan is a very good recent semantics paper that merits reading. The Varzi and Lewis papers are for the very curious and/or philosophically-minded. There is an inconsistency-related “entry on my weblog”:http://semantics-online.org/2004/01/paraconsistentsemanticsfornaturallanguage.

As an experiment, I am using the expression in the world of Sherlock Holmes as the first example to be analyzed in my introduction to intensional semantics this semester. The idea is not so much to peek pique the interest of literary theorists — although why not — but to start with an expression that wears its possible worlds semantics on its sleeve.

Of course, after some preliminaries one quickly realizes that there is no such thing as the world of Sherlock Holmes. David Lewis (in his “Truth in Fiction”) writes:

[I]t will not do to follow ordinary language to the extent of supposing that we can somehow single out a single one of the worlds … . Is the world of Sherlock Holmes a world where Holmes has an even or an odd number of hairs on his head at the moment when he first meets Watson? What is Inspector Lestrade’s blood type? It is absurd to suppose that these questions about the world of Sherlock Holmes have answers. The best explanation of that is that the worlds of Sherlock Holmes are plural, and the questions have different answers at different ones.

Usually, one then makes the move of making such operators universal quantifiers over accessible worlds. And with some important wrinkles, that’s what Lewis does. But he also writes this intriguing passage:

… these are the worlds of Sherlock Holmes. What is true throughout them is true in the stories; what is false throughout them is false in the stories; what is true at some and false at others is neither true nor false in the stories. Any answer to the silly questions just asked would doubtless fall in the last category.

As far as I can see, his semantic proposal does not actually deliver this result. According to his (essentially universally quantified) semantics, it is simply false that in the world(s) of Sherlock Holmes, Lestrade has blood type A. But he is on to something with his intuition, I believe.

Bonomi & Zucchi in the only other paper I have read about fiction operators mention in a footnote Lewis’ desire for a truth-value gap in such cases but say that for simplicity they will stick to the universally quantified semantics. [Andrea Bonomi & Alessandro Zucchi. (2003) "A pragmatic framework for truth in fiction" Dialectica, pdf preprint]

I am intrigued by this, since it reminds me of facts I have found with other operators as well. In my “Bare Plurals, Bare Conditionals, and Only” paper (abstract, preprint), I argued that operators like definite plurals, generic bare plurals, and bare conditionals have a homogeneity presupposition, which results in presupposition failure when not all the cases quantified over behave the same. For example, the kids are asleep is true when all of them are asleep, false when none of them are, and neither true nor false when some are and some aren’t. This was first argued for by Janet Fodor in her dissertation.

It is interesting to see something similar argued for with fiction operators. So, my question to any readers that know more about this than me: has this topic been addressed in more detail anywhere in the fiction operator literature? Has anyone actually proposed a semantics that cashes out Lewis’ intuition?

Thanks. And I’ll gladly reciprocate with hints about topics I know at least something about.

Chapter 1: Beginnings of Intensional Semantics is available online and will be handed out in the first class tomorrow.

On this site, I will make the lecture notes available in two forms: chapter by chapter and as “one big download”:http://semantics-online.org/advsem/IntensionalSemantics.pdf (which will grow incrementally). Note that the big set is the only format which takes full advantage of hyperlinking in the pdf-file. The individual chapter files are more static.

Throughout the semester, I will be handing out chapters from our lecture notes on intensional semantics. These are co-authored by myself and Irene Heim and have been evolving for years now, starting with some old notes from the early 1990s by Angelika Kratzer, Irene Heim, and myself, which have since been modified and expanded every year by Irene or myself. Because this version of the notes has not been seen by my co-author, I alone am responsible for any defects.

This is a work in progress. We may eventually publish these materials as a follow-up volume to Heim & Kratzer’s Semantics in Generative Grammar, Blackwell 1998. In the meantime, we encourage the use of these notes in courses at other institutions. Of course, you need to give full credit to the authors and you may not use the notes for any commercial purposes. If you use the notes, we would like to be notified and we would very much appreciate any comments, criticism, and advice on these materials.