Semantics etc.

[From "Sappho's Breathing":http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/archives/000433.html]

bq. Q: What’s the difference between an extroverted mathematician and an introverted mathematician?
A: The extroverted mathematician will look at your feet when s/he’s talking to you.

Substitute your favorite geeky pursuit for mathematics, if you like.

Bart Geurts. “Unary quantification revisited”, ms, University of Nijmegen.

bq. Abstract: Unary quantification is not as bad as its name.

Bart Geurts. “On an ambiguity in quantified conditionals”, ms, University of Nijmegen.

bq. Abstract: Conditional sentences with quantifying expressions are systematically ambigous. In one reading, the if-clause restricts the domain of the overt quantifier; in the other, the if-clause restricts the domain of a covert quantifier, which defaults to epistemic necessity. Although the ambiguity follows directly from the Lewis-Kratzer line on if, it is not generally acknowledged, which has led to pseudoproblems and spurious arguments.

[KvF: I will have to read this soon, since one of the sets of "pseudoproblems and spurious arguments" that Bart attacks comes courtesy of a paper that Sabine Iatridou and I gave a couple of years ago: "If and When If-Clauses Can Restrict Quantifiers" -- see also Higginbotham's parallel work: "Conditionals and Compositionality".]

Angelika Kratzer. “Covert Quantifier Restrictions in Natural Language”. Talk given at Palazzo Feltrinelli in Gargnano, June 11, 2004. [Slides, References].

Jason Stanley has a post “Epistemic Modals, Relative Truth, and Contextualism” at the epistemology group weblog Certain Doubts, together with a lively comments thread.

This reminds me that on my summer plate is a paper that Thony Gillies and I plan to write about epistemic modals in context, provisionally entitled ‘Might’ Made Right. Gotta get cracking.

BTW: There are more or less obvious connections to the topic Peter Lasersohn explores in his recent draft on predicates of personal taste, “noted below”:http://semantics-online.org/2004/07/lasersohnonpersonal_taste.

Peter Lasersohn. “Context Dependence, Disagreement, and Predicates of Personal Taste”, DRAFT 7/5/2004.

bq. Conclusion I have argued that sentences containing predicates of personal taste are not completely objective; their truth values vary from person to person. However, this variation in truth value does not involve a variation in semantic content: If you say roller coasters are fun, and I say they are not, I am negating the very same sentence content which you assert, and directly contradicting you. Nonetheless, both our utterances can be true (relative to their separate contexts). I presented a semantics which gives this result by introducing an individual index, analogous to the world and time indices commonly used, and by treating the pragmatic context as supplying a particular value for this index. However, the context supplies this value in the derivation of truth values from content, not in the derivation of content from character. Predicates of personal taste therefore display a kind of contextual variation in interpretation which is unlike the familiar variation exhibited by pronouns and other indexicals.

Michael Glanzberg. “Quantifiers” (for E. Lepore and B. Smith (eds), Handbook of Philosophy of Language, OUP)

Roumyana Pancheva. (2004). “Another Perfect Puzzle”, ms, USC.

Mats Rooth. “Topic Accents on Quantifiers” (postscript file). To appear in The Partee Effect , Greg Carlson and Jeffrey Pelletier, (eds.) Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Line Mikkelsen. Specifying Who: On The Structure, Meaning, And Use Of Specificational Copular Clauses. PhD Dissertation, UCSC, June 2004. (Update: Now also available at the Semantics Archive.)

bq. Abstract This dissertation is concerned with a class of copular clauses known as specificational clauses, and its relation to other kinds of copular structures, predicational and equative clauses in particular.
Based on evidence from Danish and English, I argue that specificational clauses involve the same core predication structure as predicational clauses—one which combines a referential and a predicative expression to form a minimal predicational unit—but differ from them in how the predicational core is realized syntactically. Predicational copular clauses represent the canonical realization, where the referential expression is aligned with the most prominent syntactic position, the subject position. Specificational clauses involve an unusual alignment of the predicative expression with subject position. Building on work by Prince (1992) and Birner (1996), I suggest that this unusual alignment is grounded in information structure, and, ultimately, principles of discourse coherence: the alignment of the less referential DP with the subject position serves a discourse connective function by letting material that is relatively familiar in the discourse appear before material that is relatively unfamiliar in the discourse.
I develop an analysis of predicational and specificational clauses that integrates these findings. The central syntactic mechanism that governs the derivation of the two kinds of clauses is the featural interaction between the two DPs and T, the host of the subject position. Part of this interaction is familiar from non-copular clauses, but characteristic properties of copular clauses, in particular the semantic asymmetry between the two nominals and the lightness of the copula verb itself, conspire to let information structure play a decisive role in determining which of the two DPs raises to subject position.
The analysis provides a basis for understanding the restrictions on the kinds of DPs that can occur as subjects of specificational clauses; only DPs that can denote properties and that allow the specificational clause to perform its connective discourse function can occur in this position. It further clarifies the relation between specificational and predicational clauses, and effectively sets them both apart from equative clauses, which are argued to be fundamentally different.