Semantics etc.

[New at the Semantics Archive:]

Yurie Hara. 2004. “Implicature Computation and Attitude Predicates”. ESSLLI Handout.

[New at the Semantics Archive:]

Paul Portner. 2004. “The Semantics of Imperatives within a Theory of Clause Types”. SALT 14 paper.

[New at the Semantics Archive:]

Potts, Christopher and Shigeto Kawahara. 2004. “Japanese honorifics as emotive definite descriptions”. In Kazuha Watanabe and Robert B. Young, eds., Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 14. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications.

The summer is nearing its end. I just finished the first draft syllabus for my pragmatics course this fall. I hope to condense some of the introduction to basic concepts, primarily by reigning in my tendency to get caught up in digressions. This will give me time to cover some interesting topics under current investigation, which I am quite excited about. We’ll see how it goes.

This is a dress rehearsal of sorts for the 6 week pragmatics course that I will be teaching during the LSA Summer Linguistics Institute 2005 next summer. I will only have twelve 90 minute sessions, so that version will have to be even more concentrated.

LingBuzz, started by Michal Starke, aims to be an article archive and a community space for Generative Linguistics.

LingBuzz is an openly accessible repository of scholarly papers, discussions and other documents for “generative” linguistics. On top of its own papers, it also aggregates papers from the semantics archive, the OT archive, etc. making them all available and searchable in one place. The ultimate goal of lingBuzz is however larger than an archive of papers: It aims at gradually becoming both a community center for generative linguistics and an experiment in semi-automated article ranking.

[Thanks to Brian Weatherson for the link.]

There is also a course calendar.

The official version of the course syllabus is now available.

Philippe Schlenker. “Ontological Symmetry in Language: A Brief Manifesto”, very first draft, UCLA & IJN (last modified: August 17, 2004)

bq. Abstract: In the influential tradition of quantified modal logic, it was assumed that significantly different linguistic systems underlie reference to individuals, to times and to possible situations or ‘possible worlds’. Recent results from formal semantics suggest that this is not so, and that there is in fact a pervasive symmetry between the linguistic means with which we refer to all three domains. In particular, reference to individuals, times and worlds alike is effected through restricted, generalized quantifiers, definite descriptions, and pronouns. In each domain grammatical features (=person, tense, mood) serve to situate the reference of terms as near, far or ‘further’ from the actual or from a reported speech act. A particularly close correspondence is found between reference to times and reference to worlds, which could suggest that these should be re-analyzed as a single ontological domain of events and states. This reinterpretation leads to a general symmetry between the nominal domain and the verbal domain, one that has been explored from a different angle in the study of aspect and of Noun Phrase and Verb Phrase structure. We conclude with several potential interpretations of this general principle of ontological symmetry. An Appendix includes an explicit formal fragment, which (i) treats reference to individuals, to times and to worlds in a completely symmetric fashion, (ii) allows predicates to be evaluated even in the absence of any syntactically represented arguments, and (iii) treats implicit restrictions on quantifier domains in terms of an accessibility relation between sequences of evaluation and objects that are quantified over. (ii) and (iii) are properties usually associated with modal logics. Still, (iv) when the accessibility relation is trivial, our system has the expressive power and some of the syntactic properties of a logic with full quantification of individual, time and world variables. This system can thus be seen as a compromise between an extensional and an intensional logic.

Today, I received my author’s copy of the book Descriptions and Beyond, edited by Marga Reimer and Anne Bezuidenhout:

The book contains my paper “Would You Believe It? The King of France is Back! (Presuppositions and Truth-Value Intuitions)” [uncorrected proof, if you can’t wait for your copy of the book] and many other goodies. Here’s the table of contents:

Part I: Incomplete Descriptions
1. Descriptions and Situations, Francois Recanati 2. An Abuse of Context in Semantics: The Case of Incomplete Definite Descriptions, Ernie Lepore 3. This, That, and the Other, Stephen Neale
Part II: The Referential/Attributive Distinction
4. Descriptions: Points of Reference, Kent Bach 5. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Nathan Salmon 6. Descriptive Indexicals and Indexical Descriptions, Geoffrey Nunberg 7. The Case for Referential Descriptions, Michael Devitt
Part III: Presupposition and Truth-Value Gaps
8. Would you Believe It? The King of France is Back! (Presuppositions and Truth-Value Intuitions), Kai von Fintel 9. Descriptions, Linguistic Topic/Comment and Negative Existentials, Jay Atlas
Part IV: Representation of Definites and Indefinites in Semantic Theory
10. Referring Descriptions, Mark Sainsbury 11. The Vernacular and the Omniscient Observer of History, Joseph Almog 12. On a Unitary Analysis for Definite and Indefinite Descriptions, Peter Ludlow and Gabriel Segal
Part V: Anaphoric Pronouns and Descriptions, Indefinites and Dynamic Semantics/Syntax
13. Indefinites and Anaphoric Independence: A Case for Dynamic Semantics and Pragmatics?, Richard Breheny 14. Grounding Dynamic Semantics, Paul Dekker 15. Pronouns as Definites, Craige Roberts 16. Anaphoric Definite Descriptions, Alice ter Meulen 17. Indefinites and Scope Choice, Ruth Kempson & Wilfried Meyer-Viol
Part VI: Names and Descriptions
18. Descriptive Descriptive Names, Robin Jeshion 19. Descriptively Introduced Names, Marga Reimer
References Index

Angelika Kratzer. Building Resultatives. ms, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, August 2004. To appear in Claudia Maienborn und Angelika Wöllstein-Leisten (eds.): Event Arguments in Syntax, Semantics, and Discourse. Tübingen, Niemeyer.

bq. In this paper, I will develop an event-based analysis of (mostly German) resultatives […]. I will argue that the causal relation in resultatives is carried by an unpronounced affix attached to the adjective. Resultatives do not force us to assume that syntactic constructions or semantic composition rules can introduce non-logical meaning components like causal relations. I will also work towards a hypothesis that links the constraints for the verbs and adjectives in German resultative constructions to more general properties that might eventually tell us what it takes for a language to have resultative constructions to begin with. In interaction with a standard event semantics, simple morphological properties conspire to allow or disallow resultatives and force them to behave the way they do.

[New at the Semantics Archive]

Chris Barker. Parasitic Scope. [”This is a rough draft of July 2, 2004 based on my SALT 14 talk at Northwestern University on 15 May 2004.”]

bq. Keenan (1992) proves there is no generalized quantifier that expresses the meaning the same two books. And indeed, previous analyses of adjectives like same have been heavily pragmatic (Dowty 1985, Beck 2000) or else deliberately noncompositional, either building syntactically discontinuous higherorder quantifiers (Keenan 1992, van Eijck 2003), or relying on side calculations (Stump 1982, Moltmann 1992). Building on insights of Carlson (1987), I propose the first strictly compositional semantic account of same. New data, including especially NP-internal uses such as two men with the same name, suggests that same is a quantificational element taking scope over nominals. Given lift as a basic type-shifting operator, I show that this proposal follows naturally from the fact that same is an adjective. Independently motivated assumptions extend the analysis to standard examples such as Anna and Bill read the same book via a mechanism I call parasitic scope, in which the scope of same depends on the scope of some other scope-taking element in the sentence. Although I initially express the main analysis within a movement-based framework with Quantifier Raising in the style of Heim and Kratzer (1998), I go on to implement the analysis within a continuation-based, variable-free, directly compositional combinatory-categorial grammar, without Quantifier Movement or any use of Logical Form distinct from surface structure. The empirical payoff for dealing in continuations is that a simple generalization accounts for the first time for cases in which same distributes over objects other than NP denotations, as in the relevant interpretation of John hit and killed the same man.

[New at the Semantics Archive]

Beaver, David and Henk Zeevat. Accommodation. July 2004, Chapter to appear in Ramchand, G. and C. Reiss (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces, Oxford University Press.

bq. Accommodation is an inferential process whereby hearers react to presuppositions that are not satisfied. Accommodation can be seen as an adjustment of a model of the common ground, or an adjustment to a representation of the meaning of an utterance. This handbook chapter surveys accounts of accommodation including, for example, models of Lewis, Heim and van der Sandt. We condense generalizations about accommodation into fourteen principles that are either implicit or explicit in prior literature, and discuss empirical and theoretical pros and cons of each of them. We also consider evidence that patterns of accommodation differ from trigger to trigger. We discuss alternative explanations of this phenomenon and the implications it has for the taxonomy of presupposition inducing expressions.

Language under Uncertainty: Modals, Evidentials, and Conditionals

Kyoto University, Japan: January 21-23, 2005

Speakers frequently make assertions based on partial knowledge, inconclusive evidence, or unreliable sources of information. All languages provide inventories of expressions of uncertainty, of which modals, evidentials and conditionals are typical examples. Both within and across languages, such expressions exhibit great variation in their syntactic and semantic properties, pragmatic conditions on use, and interactions with other grammatical categories such as tenses, discourse particles, and quantifiers. Despite much recent work on their properties and idiosyncrasies, the cross-linguistic study of such expressions is hampered by a lack of agreement on terminological and methodological questions on the one hand, and limitations on the applicability and expressive power of standard logical analysis tools, on the other.
This conference aims to address this situation by bringing together researchers working in areas including (but not limited to):

• the descriptive and typological study of modals, evidentials, and conditionals;
• the syntax and semantics of particular expressions and their interaction with tenses and other grammatical categories;
• the development of new and refined formal analytical tools to meet the needs of linguistic theory.

Submissions due: September 20, 2004

John MacFarlane. “How to Be a Relativist About Truth” (version of May 24, 2004)

bq. This is a talk I gave at several places this spring. I address three questions: (1) Why might one want to embrace relativism about truth? (2) How should the position be stated? (3) How can we make philosophical sense of relative-truth talk?

Paul Portner. “Vocatives, Topics, and Imperatives”, handout of a talk delivered at the IMS workshop on Information Structure, Bad Teinach, Germany, July 16, 2004.

Danny Fox. Implicature calculation, syntax or pragmatics, or both. Talk given at Universidad del País Vasco, Basque Country, May 2004 (includes some recent work with Martin Hackl on comparatives and degree questions).

This is the course website for the Fall 2004 incarnation of course 24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory. The first class meeting is on Wednesday, September 8, 2004. See you then.

[Last year’s website has been archived, You can access it at http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/2003/.]

The semantics etc. home page sports a new feature in the right sidebar: a list of quick links to web pages of interest to semantics and related fields. As I come across interesting pages, I add them to my list at spurl.net, an online bookmark management system. With some javascript magic, new semantics-related entries are then fed to readers of this weblog.

Instead of checking the home page for new quick links, you can also subscribe to an “RSS feed”:http://www.spurl.net/rss.php?features=off&category=17581&limit=20 for the semantics quick links with your newsreader.

If you look at them now, there some old ones from a while back when I was first trying out spurl.net but also some new ones. Today I added two new linguistics weblogs:

• phonoloblog: Started by Eric Bakovic: a weblog for phonologists (and other interested linguists) to share any and all ideas relevant to phonology and phonological theory.
• Meaning and Thinking: a weblog from the center of Relevance Theory. “Occasional near-random comments on Relevance Theory and/or post-Gricean and cognitive pragmatics. And probably some stuff about philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, psychology, formal semantics, logic and Grice exegesis from an outsider’s perspective.”