Semantics etc.

Paolo Mancosu, Richard Zach, and Calixto Badesa: The Development of Mathematical Logic from Russell to Tarski: 1900-1935. In: Leila Haaparanta, ed., The History of Modern Logic. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, to appear. 178 pp.

bq. Abstract: The period from 1900 to 1935 was particularly fruitful and important for the development of logic and logical metatheory. This survey is organized along eight “itineraries” concentrating on historically and conceptually linked strands in this development. Itinerary I deals with the evolution of conceptions of axiomatics. Itinerary II centers on the logical work of Bertrand Russell. Itinerary III presents the development of set theory from Zermelo onward. Itinerary IV discusses the contributions of the algebra of logic tradition, in particular, Löwenheim and Skolem. Itinerary V surveys the work in logic connected to the Hilbert school, and itinerary V deals specifically with consistency proofs and metamathematics, including the incompleteness theorems. Itinerary VII traces the development of intuitionistic and many-valued logics. Itinerary VIII surveys the development of semantical notions from the early work on axiomatics up to Tarski’s work on truth.

[From “Brian Weatherson”:http://tar.weatherson.net/archives/002605.html]:

Two new philosophy blogs worth noting. Soon there will be too many for anyone to keep track of!

“Richard Zach”:http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/logblog/

“Joe Shieber”:http://philonous.typepad.com/musings_from_the_lehigh_v/

“Philippe Schlenker”:http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schlenker/. “Scopal Independence: On Branching & Island-Escaping Readings of Indefinites & Disjunctions”, first draft, UCLA & IJN.

bq. Abstract: Hintikka claimed in the 1970’s that indefinites and disjunctions give rise to ‘branching readings’ that can only be handled by a ‘game-theoretic’ semantics as expressive as a logic with quantification over Skolem functions. Due to empirical and methodological difficulties, the issue was left unresolved in the linguistics literature. Independently, however, it was discovered in the 1980’s that, contrary to other quantifiers, indefinites may scope out of syntactic islands. We claim that (i) branching readings and the island-escaping behavior of indefinites are two sides of the same coin: when the latter problem is considered in full generality, a mechanism of ‘functional quantification’ (Winter 1998, 2003) must be postulated which is strictly more expressive than Hintikka’s, and predicts that his branching readings are indeed real, although his own solution was insufficiently general. Furthermore, (ii) we show that, as Hintikka had seen, disjunctions share the behavior of indefinites, both with respect to island-escaping behavior and (probably) branching readings. The functional analysis can thus naturally be extended to them. Finally, (iii) we suggest that the functional analysis can and should be reinterpreted in terms of a mechanism of double quantification, according to which an indefinite may contribute (a) an existential quantifier which has narrow scope, but which (b) includes in its restrictor a definite description over identifying properties, i.e. properties which, given a certain number of individual arguments, hold true of exactly one object.

“Susi Wurmbrand”:http://www.linguistics.uconn.edu/susi.html has started a blog on “Germanic Linguistics”:http://wurmbrand.uconn.edu/Germanic/.

[From “Open Access News”:http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/20040523_fosblogarchive.html#a108570473636981236]:

bq. Elsevier now permits important kinds of postprint archiving. Authors may post the final editions of their full-text Elsevier articles to their personal web sites or their institutional repositories, but not to repositories elsewhere. The OA [Open Access] edition must be author-made, not Elsevier’s PDF or HTML, and must include a link either to the journal’s home page or the article’s DOI. Stevan Harnad “announced the good news”:https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/759.html to multiple listservs, based on an email from Karen Hunter, Elsevier’s Senior VP for Strategy. (PS: This is a breakthrough. Permission for postprint archiving is all that authors need to provide OA to the final, peer-reviewed editions of their own work. Elsevier deserves our thanks for adopting this most helpful policy. Elsevier authors –past, present, and future — should take advantage of the new policy without delay. Other publishers should imitate it. Universities that haven’t already done so should accommodate it by launching institutional repositories.)

I have been agonizing over signing over my copyright to an old manuscript of mine (”A Minimal Theory of Adverbial Quantification”:http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/minimal.pdf) to Elsevier for publication in a long-overdue collection (”Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning”:http://www.elsevier.com/wps/product/cws_home/639475). With this new policy, I feel better about that, although I would really prefer to keep my copyright and just assign a non-exclusive license to the publisher.

My own list of SALT talks with linked handouts and other materials may have to wait until after I get back from my family’s beach vacation next week, but in the mean time you can read Chris Potts’ “report on SALT”:http://people.umass.edu/potts/whisc/whisc-2004-5-20-salt.html, which is part of this week’s edition of WHISC, the UMass Linguistics newsletter.

One of the UN’s “Top Ten Stories The World Should Hear More About“:

bq. Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation
A number of Amazonian groups face extinction as their space to live away from the modern world disappears
Far from the eyes of the world, some sixty-four indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation in Amazonian Ecuador, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia – the Tagaeri, Huaorani, Taromenane, Corubo, Amamhuaca, Mascho, Kineri, Nanti, Nahua and Kugapakori, among others – are condemned to gradual extinction. These tribes remain mysterious, avoiding all contact with strangers and preferring the isolated existence they have maintained for centuries. What little is known about them has been gleaned from other indigenous groups and from chance encounters with developers and rights groups. But what is clear is that their numbers are rapidly dwindling: the Coruba now number only 40; and the number of Mascho speakers is estimated to be between 20 and 100. The Amamhuaca language, it is thought, is spoken only by 720 people: 500 in Peru and 220 in Brazil.
Attempts to learn more about these groups can prove fatal. The last known report of contact with the Tagaeri, the indigenous group with the strictest self-imposed isolation, was in July 1987, when two missionaries whose attempt to convince the tribe to allow oil extractors to enter their territory led to their deaths. The Tagaeri subsequently abandoned their homes and disappeared deeper into dense forests, demonstrating their rejection of co-existence with the modern world.
Gas and oil companies, loggers, miners and entrepreneurs are viewed by indigenous groups as “ghosts of death” for the toxic legacy they can leave behind and which can poison rivers and forests considered as a source of life for these communities. These indigenous groups have developed their own health care and food gathering systems, but which are fragile and easily threatened by damage to the ecosystems wherein they live. All too often contact with outsiders results in the transfer of disease, resulting in epidemics since the indigenous peoples have no immunities to what are common and treatable diseases elsewhere.
Governments around the world have increasingly acknowledged the rights of indigenous peoples. In part, this has been the result of a process of empowerment by such groups, who have pressed their demands on governments. In the case of groups living in isolation, preferring to avoid contact with government representatives and other communities, responding to their needs is far more difficult. The Brazilian Government was among the first to take steps to adopt a policy of creating territorial reserves for people living in voluntary isolation that are “no-go zones” to extractive industries and migrants. Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are also looking at similar action. The challenge facing the impoverished governments of the region is to balance the further exploitation of the riches of the Amazonian belt in the name of development, and the protection of these fragile indigenous groups, and the cultural heritage they represent.

[Found via “Crooked Timber”:http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001882.html]

Brad DeLong has to this say as advice to a new Ph.D.:

bq. What does one say to a newly-minted Ph.D. in Economics immediately after graduation? One says this:
“Congratulations. You’ve done it. Take a deep breath and be proud of yourself. You’ve not only done it, you’ve landed a tenure-track job. You’ve not only landed a tenure-track job, but the fact that you had more than one offer means that over the next several years you’ll not only be much better paid but you’ll also teach less than you have in the years just past.
“But don’t think your life will be easy. In six years your university will send out for letters, asking outsiders whether you should be given tenure. What the letter-writers will say about you in year six depends on the articles of yours that they have read in year five. Since nobody reads the journals cover to cover anymore, they will read in year five only those articles published in year four that others have told them are worth reading. To get an article published in year four, you must submit the final draft to the journal after year two.
Thus you need, for the next two years, to work harder than you have ever worked in your life: what you produce in the next two years plays an extraordinarily large role in making your long-run academic reputation.”

This sounds pretty much right. Life gets much harder after grad school.

However, in semantics at least, new faculty has somewhat more time to establish themselves, for two reasons I believe: (i) the field is much smaller than economics, so new important work gets recognized throughout the network of researchers much faster, (ii) peer-reviewed journals are important as some sort of validation mechanism, but the actual dissemination of research happens outside journals, at the major conferences, in colloquia, and through online sharing of papers and is thus more time-efficient. I would estimate that work begun in the third and fourth years can still have significant impact on the tenure decision in semantics, and I would guess in other fields of linguistics as well.

Petra Hendriks. 2004. Either, both and neither in coordinate structures. To appear in: A. ter Meulen & W. Abraham (eds.), The Composition of Meaning. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.

bq. When the elements either, both and neither occur in a coordinate structure, they are usually analyzed as conjunctions. In this paper, it is argued that these elements are better analyzed as focus particles. The analysis of these so-called initial or correlative conjunctions as focus particles is motivated by their resemblance to focus particles with respect to (1) their distribution, (2) their interaction with sentential intonation, and (3) their contribution to the interpretation of the sentence.

At SALT, Sally McConnell-Ginet mentioned Michael Fara’s work on habitual sentences. It’s a couple of years old, but I am not sure that many semanticists have seen it, since the semantic proposal is but one chapter in an otherwise very philosophical dissertation. Anyway, I looked at it and it certainly seems like something semanticists should read:

“Michael Fara”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/fara/index.html. 2001: “Dispositions and Their Ascriptions”:http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/research/fara/dissertation.pdf. PhD Dissertation. Princeton University. [Chapter 4: The Semantics of Habituals, pp. 50–80].

(An)Thony S. Gillies. “Conditionals, Scorekeeping, and Conditional Scorekeeping”. Presentation at Society for Exact Philosophy, 2004. [beamer presentation]

I am back from SALT, which was a very good conference with lots of interesting presentations and convivial collegiality. What a great bunch of people semanticists are!

I was admonished to keep up my blogging. Having neglected the web log over the last few weeks as the semester’s work reached a crescendo, I will try to catch up, although there is that beach vacation next week which will interfere a bit.

One thing I’ll try to do in one of my many idle moments is to assemble a list of SALT talks with downloadable handouts etc. I would encourage everyone who presented to post their handouts and/or paper drafts to their websites or the “Semantics Archive”:http://semanticsarchive.net.

My own handout, as “mentioned earlier”:http://semantics-online.org/2004/05/anatomyofa_modal, is already “available”:http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/salt04.pdf.

I’m off to “SALT”:http://ling.northwestern.edu/~salt14/program.html in a couple of hours. I will be presenting joint work with Sabine Iatridou on a previously unnoticed construction:

• To get good ice-cream, you only have to go down to the corner store.

We plan to write up the paper over the summer. For now, there are two handouts: the “SALT handout”:http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/salt04.pdf, which focuses on the compositional structure of this construction and the “GLOW handout”:http://web.mit.edu/fintel/www/glow04.pdf, which has more cross-linguistic facts and syntactic discussion.

Christopher Potts and Shigeto Kawahara. “The Performative Nature of Japanese Honorifics”. Draft of a Paper to be Presented at SALT 14, Northwestern, May 16. {draft paper, handout}

–

“SALT”:http://ling.northwestern.edu/~salt14/program.html is taking place tomorrow through Sunday. It should be a good conference. Lots of interesting stuff on the program. I will be flying to Chicago this afternoon. Before I leave, I will post our handout as well.

Kent Bach. “On Referring and Not Referring”:http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~kbach/referring.pdf. [Draft (May 10, 2004) for UConn Semantics Workshop, May 21–22, 2004]

John MacFarlane. “The Assessment Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions”:http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/macfarlane/relknow.pdf (version of May 10, 2004)

bq. Current debates about the semantics of knowledge-attributing sentences center on whether the epistemic standards relevant to the truth of such sentences vary with the context of use, the circumstances of evaluation, or neither. I argue that although the strict invariantists are right that the standards do not vary in either of these ways, the contextualists are also right to think that there is some kind of contextual variation in the standards. On the semantics I propose, the relevant epistemic standard varies not with the context of use, but with the context of assessment: the concrete context in which an utterance is being assessed for truth or falsity. The price of this reconciliation of contextualism and invariantism is that I must explain what it means to talk of truth relative to a context of assessment. I discharge this obligation by describing the role assessment-relative truth plays in a normative account of assertion.

Friday May 7, 2004 was the official opening of the “Stata Center”:http://web.mit.edu/evolving/stata/index.html, the amazing new building that houses the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, my place of work. Of course, our department is dwarfed by the other occupants of the building, 900+ “computer scientists”:http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/news/stata.html.

There are some good articles appearing about our building, which was designed by Frank Gehry. Here are two I liked:

• Wired Magazine: “Frank Gehry’s Geek Palace”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.05/mit.html
• Technology Review: “Stata’s Symbols”:http://techreview.com/articles/print_version/vandre0504.asp

Update: See now also this NY Times article:

• NY Times: “Frank Gehry Gives M.I.T. Its Newest Experiment”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/13/arts/design/13MIT.html?ex=1399780800&en=17b644e0af004e14&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

We will be hosting the 2005 LSA Summer Institute, showing off our brand-new geek palace to the world of linguistics. See you there!

Andy Egan, John Hawthorne and Brian Weatherson: “Epistemic Modals in Context”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/weatherson/em.pdf. Forthcoming in Contextualism in Philosophy, Preyer and Peter, eds. (New Draft Posted 5/7/04)

bq. A very simple contextualist treatment of a sentence containing an epistemic modal, e.g. a might be F, is that it is true iff for all the contextually salient community knows, a is F. It is widely agreed that the simple theory will not work in some cases, but the counterexamples produced so far seem amenable to a more complicated contextualist theory. We argue, however, that no contextualist theory can capture the evaluations speakers naturally make of sentences containing epistemic modals. If we want to respect these evaluations, our best option is a relativist theory of epistemic modals. On a relativist theory, an utterance of a might be F can be true relative to one context of evaluation and false relative to another. We argue that such a theory does better than any rival approach at capturing all the behaviour of epistemic modals.

[Thony Gillies and I have been working on a paper that takes a different tack on these issues. Hopefully, we’ll get something written up this summer. — KvF]

Geoff Pullum has a post on Language Log, riffing on a sentence he was given by Jim McCloskey: “More people have written about this than I have”. The sentence slips by any human parser, even very wary ones, and nevertheless it is complete gibberish once you try to figure out what it means.

I wrote to Geoff, saying that I remembered the original version to have been “More people have been to Russia than I have” and that I vaguely remembered that Mario Montalbetti came up with it. In the absence of anything better to do on this momentous day here at the world headquarters of semantics etc. (it is the official dedication of our new building, the Stata Center, more on which some time soon), I dug around and here is what I found:

In the “Prologue” to Montalbetti’s dissertation (p. 6), he writes:

To Herman Schultze, my eternal gratitude for uttering the most amazing */? sentence I’ve ever heard: “More people have been to Berlin than I have”. (Some have taken this sentence to be a proof of the autonomy of syntax!).

[Mario M. Montalbetti: 1984. After Binding: On the Interpretation of Pronouns. MIT PhD Dissertation.]

I have to confess that I didn’t page through the entire work to see whether there is any further mention of the example (it would be great if I could electronically search it — but alas).

So, I went to google. There are a few hits for the Russia version, none for the Berlin version.

At http://www.kith.org/logos/words/upper/G.comments.html, one finds the Russia sentence among some other teasers, with this comment:

[I had thought Elliott Moreton came up with “More people have been to Russia than I have,” but he wrote in to set the record straight: “I heard it around the Brain & Cognitive Sciences dept at MIT circa 1993, quoted by William Snyder in conversation. He attributed it to a mid-1970s syntax paper by someone with an Italian surname, but I forget who.” My apologies to the original author for my misattribution.]

So, this might in fact go back to Montalbetti, although it’s the Russia version, not the Berlin version.

At http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lachter/research.html, the Russia version is said to be due to Andy Barss, but that can’t be. I’m sure it’s just that Andy told this guy about the example.

Colin Philips uses a Paris version in his 101 notes:

*More people have been to Paris than I have.
[Note: while most of the class shared the instructor’s intuition that this sentence ’sounded fine’, but turned out to be impossible to interpret, for one group of students were able to get the interpretation for this “Not just I have been to Paris”.]

Chris Potts uses a Brooklyn version in his class notes:

Are there any grammatical sentences that we can’t find meanings for? Yes. Amazing though it might seem, there are such sentences. Consider this weird one: “More people have been to Brooklyn than I have.” Meaningless, right? But it sounds okay.

Chris refers to a page by Ken Shan, who has a Moscow version:

Please analyze these sentences: *More people have been to Moscow than I have. (mentioned by Lance Nathan)

[Lance is a graduate student here at MIT.]

Lastly, a student author in the official student newspaper of the University of Houston uses an Iraq version:

I admit that more people have been to Iraq than I have, so I don’t know everything.

That’s all I have. Don’t know whether this really came all from Montalbetti’s friend (?) and that from then on people just plugged in whatever place name they could think of.

Does anyone know more about the provenance of this example type?