Semantics etc.

[via "Open Access News":http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/20040321_fosblogarchive.html#a108005892931588515]

Apropos my post on “freely accessible books”:http://semantics-online.org/2004/03/bookprojects and Greg Restall’s post on the “same topic”:http://consequently.org/news/2004/03/18/publishinga_book/index.html, read Jeffrey Tucker from the Ludwig von Mises Institute on Books, Online and Off:

bq. Tucker points out that online books and their print counterparts are seen as complementary, fulfilling similar and disparate functions for the reader. One example discussed is Mises’ Omnipotent Government, which the “current publisher” declined the Institute the rights to publish freely online. So the Institute negotiated to lease the book and pay the publisher for expected lost revenues.
“What happened was precisely the reverse of what the publisher expected. Instead of lost sales, the sales of the book shot up. In the few weeks since the text went online, more copies of this book left our warehouse than during the whole of the last decade. Omnipotent Government is now a top seller in the Mises.org catalog. The publisher obtained not only the leasing fee from our offices but suddenly enjoyed a flood of new orders for the book from us.”

[An earlier version of Tucker's piece is "here":http://www.mises.org/blog/archives/whyweputbooksonline_001698.asp.]

Luis Alonso-Ovalle. Simplification of Disjunctive Antecedents, In Keir Moulton and Matthew Wolf (eds.) (2004), Proceedings of the North East Linguistic Society 34. University of Massachusetts, Amherst: GLSA.

Leiter reports:

bq. Jason Stanley, currently at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has accepted the offer from Rutgers University at New Brunswick.

Greg Restall reports on his “plans for his next book”:http://consequently.org/news/2004/03/18/publishingabook/index.html.

bq. On and off, I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do with my next book. I mean, I’m planning to write the thing, and to see to it that it is published by a decent publisher. So much is required for it to get the kind of institutional recognition that is necessary for people in a position like mine.
However, I’m looking for something more than that. I’m looking for my book to be read. Getting read is more difficult than getting published, given the avalanche of academic material published each year. I’m hoping for this book to be read, for it to be assigned as a textbook, for it to corrupt the minds of the youth, and for it to shape the field for years to come. (I may as well aim high.)
I have come to the conclusion that one very good way for me to do this is for me to give the book away for free: I plan to post the book chapters, as they’re written, online here, to have them indexed by search engines, to get people like you linking to it on your website, glancing through it, giving me feedback, helping me to improve it, etc., and to link to it, making it appear higher in search rankings, and giving other people more ways to stumble onto it, etc.

He points at one remarkable precedent:

bq. Allen Hatcher, the topologist at Cornell, has published his Algebraic Topology textbook with Cambridge University Press, and he still offers the whole thing for a free download at his site. This is unbelievably smart, if Allen’s aim (as I suspect it is) is to be read by readers. Allen’s distribution rights are more restrictive than some public distribution conditions: he, and Cambridge University Press, allow you to print a single copy of the book from the files for personal use, but not to photocopy multiple copies. This is not exactly simple for them to enforce, but you can understand why they make this restriction.

I looked at Allen’s page about the book. One thing that is revealed by the bye is that he is not being paid royalties for the book. Perhaps, that’s the part of the deal that is allowing him to make the book available online.

An arrangement like Allen’s deal with CUP and like the one Greg is after is precisely what I am hoping to do with my book project(s). I would want to retain the right to post chapters of my monograph on conditionals on my website as I see fit. I am also thinking of recycling some of the material for an undergraduate textbook on semantics and pragmatics, which I will try to find a publisher for who will let me maintain a continually updated electronic version, freely downloadable, in addition to the printed commercial product. So, this would mean that I need to retain the right to reuse the material from the monograph in such a form.

Via the relevant series editor, I have asked the prospective publisher of the monograph whether they would agree to such an arrangement. If not, there are other publishers to try. Obviously, Cambridge University Press has a precedent with Allen Hatcher’s book and MIT Press has precedents with William Mitchell’s City of Bits and Robert Barsky’s “book on Chomsky”:http://cognet.mit.edu/library/books/chomsky/chomsky/.

There are other important developments in online publication of scientific work, which are regularly reported in Peter Suber’s brilliant “Open Access News”:http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html.

The program for SALT (Semantics and Linguistic Theory) 14 is now available.

Check it out, “register”:http://ling.northwestern.edu/~salt14//SALT14_reg.pdf, “fly to Chicago”:http://ling.northwestern.edu/~salt14/travel.html, enjoy a weekend in “Evanston”:http://ling.northwestern.edu/~salt14/accommodation.html, and experience the premier venue for natural language semantics.

[New at the "Semantics Archive":http://semantics-archive.net]

Villalba, Xavier. “Exclamatives and negation”:http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/2FkOWM1M/exclamatives&negation.pdf. March 16, 2004.

[The pdf-file is password-protected, so I can't copy the abstract to post here. The paper looks very interesting, though. So, check it out.]

[Via "Boing Boing":http://www.boingboing.net/2004/03/17/nasacanhearunspok.html] From a “NASA press release”:http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004/mar/HQ04093subvocalspeech.html

bq. NASA scientists have begun to computerize human, silent reading using nerve signals in the throat that control speech.
In preliminary experiments, NASA scientists found that small, button-sized sensors, stuck under the chin and on either side of the “Adam’s apple,” could gather nerve signals, and send them to a processor and then to a computer program that translates them into words. Eventually, such “subvocal speech” systems could be used in spacesuits, in noisy places like airport towers to capture air-traffic controller commands, or even in traditional voice-recognition programs to increase accuracy, according to NASA scientists.
“What is analyzed is silent, or subauditory, speech, such as when a person silently reads or talks to himself,” said Chuck Jorgensen, a scientist whose team is developing silent, subvocal speech recognition at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. “Biological signals arise when reading or speaking to oneself with or without actual lip or facial movement,” Jorgensen explained.
“A person using the subvocal system thinks of phrases and talks to himself so quietly, it cannot be heard, but the tongue and vocal chords do receive speech signals from the brain,” Jorgensen said.

Since the department is moving this week, I do not trust that I will have the capability of printing lecture notes etc. this week. So, I just printed out last year’s notes on the material for this week. You can pick up a copy from atop the filing cabinet opposite my office door. Or you can “download”:http://semantics-online.org/advsem/thirdreading.pdf a copy.

“Greg Restall”:http://consequently.org has a post on his current semester’s “teaching”:http://consequently.org/news/2004/03/11/teachingteachingteaching/. He reports there on an advanced undergraduate logic course he is teaching, where he is using an interesting sounding textbook:

bq. I’ve decided to follow Graham Priest’s book “An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/052179434X/geeknotes-20/102-9642575-6972917 rather closely, which means I don’t need to make too many further decisions. (It’s designed to fit into an Australian academic semester, and to follow an intro logic course just like mine.) The book doesn’t take quite the line I’d follow, but it’s much better than a merely “good enough” book that I’d use through gritted teeth. [...]
Graham structures the course around the search for a good semantics for the conditional of natural language. I think that that question is both easier (for many purposes — think of mathematical reasoning — the “material conditional” is just fine and dandy, thank you very much) and more difficult (there’s all sorts of context sensitivity in conditional constructions which a sensible look at would take you very very far away from a second-level undergraduate course) than Graham concedes, so I don’t get as much out of the central theme as Graham does.

I think the idea of Priest’s book is intriguing. In our regular teaching rotation, I am scheduled to teach our undergraduate introduction to semantics and pragmatics next spring. In previous years, I have tried to use various textbooks on the market (Chierchia & Mc-Connell-Ginet, Heim & Kratzer, de Swart), supplemented with my own notes, but I was never satisfied with the classes.

Since I am supposedly busy writing a monograph on conditionals, maybe it would be an interesting spin-off project to create an introduction to semantics and pragmatics centered around the search for an adequate analysis of the meaning of natural language conditionals. (I’ll have to think about copyright issues, because for anything like a textbook I would want to retain the right to have an annually revised version available online for free, even if the book is also distributed commercially by some publisher or other). I suppose Priest has a moral patent on the idea, but I hereby declare a derivative patent for an undergraduate semantics course centered around conditionals.

Sabine Iatridou and I have a new (rough!) draft paper:

• Kai von Fintel and Sabine Iatridou: 2004. “What to Do If You Want to Go to Harlem: Notes on Anankastic Conditionals and Related Matters”.

These notes deal with a side track in a larger project (which is going to issue in our paper in progress “Anatomy of a Modal”, which is what I will be talking about at UConn on April 9 and at SALT in May — Sabine will present the same material at GLOW in Greece in April), but we thought it had enough independent interest to warrant a separate exposition.

We discuss problems raised by what G.H. von Wright called anankastic conditionals:

bq. If you want to go to Harlem, you have to take the A train.

Kjell Johan Sæbø discusses these in his paper “Necessary Conditions in a Natural Language”:http://vivaldi.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/%7Earnim10/Festschrift/Saeboe-8-komplett%20fertig.pdf. We show that his analysis does not quite work. We go through three alternative analyses. Along the way, we address some other questions of interest.

Check it out and please send us any comments you might have.

Update: Matt Weiner has “a post on our paper”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000146.html.

Update: Matt Weiner has “another post on our paper”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000150.html.

Update: Matt Weiner has “yet another post on our paper”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/archives/000162.html — This one in particular is very thought-provoking.

For the time being, that is until the new version is ready, we will be using a chapter from last year’s lecture notes on the topic of quantifier scope in modal contexts.

Here are some more or less recent papers which include discussions of syntax-semantics issues involving quantifier scope in modal contexts:

• Kennedy, Christopher. 1997. “Antecedent-contained deletion and the syntax of quantification”. Linguistic Inquiry. 28. 662–688.
• Fox, Danny. 1999. “Reconstruction, Binding Theory, and the Interpretation of Chains”. Linguistic Inquiry. 30:2. 157–196.
• Bruening, Benjamin. 2001. “QR Obeys Superiority: Frozen Scope and ACD”. Linguistic Inquiry. 32:2. 233–273.
• Boeckx, Cedric. 2001. “Scope Reconstruction and A-Movement”. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. 19:3. 503–548.
• Fox, Danny. 2002. “Antecedent-Contained Deletion and the Copy Theory of Movement”. Linguistic Inquiry. 33:1. 63–96.
• Sauerland, Uli and Elbourne, Paul. 2002. Total Reconstruction, PF Movement, and Derivational Order. Linguistic Inquiry. 33:2. 283–319.
• von Fintel, Kai and Iatridou, Sabine. 2003. “Epistemic Containment”. Linguistic Inquiry. 34:2. 173–198.

Actually, Fox 2002 presents a particular version of the copy theory of movement, whose consequences for the discussion of syntactic reconstruction for the purpose of deriving de dicto readings of raised subjects might be interesting to look at.

A very rudimentary draft of Chapter 5 of the lecture notes is now “available”:http://semantics-online.org/advsem/5.Ordering.pdf.

Some rather terse notes on conditionals are now available as “Chapter 4″:http://semantics-online.org/advsem/4.Conditionals.pdf of the lecture notes.

Stefan Kaufmann: A Modal Analysis of Expressive Meaning: German ja under Quantifiers. Handout of a talk given at Kobe Shoin Graduate School, Kobe, Japan. February 28, 2004.

Manfred Krifka has two new papers on focus-related issues:

• “The semantics of questions and the focusation of answers”:http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/QuestionsSantaBarbara.pdf. To appear in Chungmin Lee (ed.).

bq. In Krifka (2001) I argued that three distinct phenomena of question semantics – alternative questions like Did it rain or not?, multiple constituent questions with pair-list readings like Who bought what? and the focus patterns of answers to constituent questions – cannot be dealt with adequately within the framework of Alternative Semantics. In Krifka (to appear) I argue that Alternative Semantics also is problematic as a framework for focus semantics in general; in particular, it makes wrong predictions in case focus occurs in syntactic islands.
In this paper I will take up an issue of Krifka (2001) again, concentrating specifically on focus patterns in answers to constituent questions. Büring (2002) argued that the discussion of phenomena in Krifka (2001) was inconclusive, and that Alternative Semantics actually does not have problems with the data put forward there. I agree with the first point, but I will also show that on closer inspection, Alternative Semantics does not predict the correct patterns of answer focus. I will also show that the same holds for the theory of Schwarzschild (1999) which works with Givenness instead of a semantic notion of Focus. The Structured Meaning theory, on the other hand, does not have these problems.

• “Association with focus phrases”:http://amor.rz.hu-berlin.de/~h2816i3x/FocusPhrases.pdf. To appear in Valerie Molnar and Susanne Winkler, Architecture of Focus, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

bq. In this article we have discussed two grammatical architectures of association with focus phenomena: Structured Meanings and Alternative Semantics. While the simplicity and parsimony of AS makes this the null hypothesis, there are certain phenomena that indicate that the additional features of SM are required. We then turned to a phenomenon that argues against SM, and for AS, the apparent lack of island restrictions with association with focus. We have discussed potential evidence that association with focus is, as a matter of fact, subject to such restrictions. Three arguments turned out to be inconclusive on closer inspection: Overt focus movement, explicit restrictions of alternatives, and the de re / de dicto ambiguity in association with focus. But three other arguments provided more solid evidence for island restrictions in association with focus: Explicit contrasts, multiple foci in syntactic islands and elliptical answers to questions. Our conclusion, then, is that structured meanings are better suited than alternative semantics to represent association with focus. As we have also noticed that focus can be arbitrarily deeply embedded within a syntactic island, a hybrid theory of association with focus which works with structured meanings and projection of alternatives in the style of AS seemed to capture the observed phenomena best.