Semantics etc.

… is now available.

Here is the reference by Kupffer that I mentioned in class:

Manfred Kupffer. “Occurrence-Dependence”. Preprint Series of the Research Group “Logic in Philosophy”. University of Konstanz.

Abstract: Within a single sentence, sometimes different syntactic occurrences of the same expression refer differently. This is what I call “occurrence-dependence”. The paper compares two frameworks that are able to deal with occurrence-dependence, namely tokenreflexive semantics and occurrence-interpretation. It is argued that the key concept of the latter framework is reducible to the key concept of the first: while tokenreflexive semantics is concerned with the interpretation of utterances, occurrences should best be understood as certain sets of utterances.

There are some lecture notes by Irene in HTML format (with some broken symbols) available at

For those of you who have not taken our 24.973 Advanced Semantics course, it may also be useful as a refresher to take a look at our lecture notes on intensional semantics. They are available at

Andy Egan. “Epistemic Modals, Relativism and Assertion”. ms. Australian National University.

I advocate a relativist semantics for epistemic modal claims such as “the treasure might be under the palm tree”, according to which such utterances determine a truth value relative to something finer-grained than just a world (or a pair). Others have argued for relativist semantics in other areas. Anyone who is inclined to relativise truth to more than just worlds and times faces a problem about assertion. It’s easy to be puzzled about just what purpose would be served by assertions of this kind, and how to understand what we’d be up to in our use of sentences like “the treasure might be under the palm tree”, if they have such peculiar truth conditions.

In what follows I will first present an example of the kind of case that motivates relativism about epistemic modals. (I’ll be talking about ‘might’, but nothing much hangs on this choice of examples. In fact, the intuitions that I’m appealing to are probably stronger for ‘probably’. So if you think I might be wrong about ‘might’, you’ll probably be happier to go along if you think about the parallel argument for ‘probably’ instead.) I’ll then sketch a relativist theory in a bit of detail. I’ll then show why there is a problem, given such a theory, about the role of epistemic modals in assertion and communication, and set out to solve it. Solving this problem will be helpful in several ways: not only does it eliminate an apparently forceful objection to relativism, but the account of the role of such claims in assertion and communication helps to make clear just what the relativist position is, exactly, and why it’s interesting.

A handout for my pragmatics course listing some recent work on scalar implicatures might be of interest to readers of this weblog. I would appreciate any pointers to other recent or ongoing work on scalar implicatures and in particular the question of how scalar items in embedded positions work.

There is now a list of recent work on implicature. I have only listed the very recent stuff. You can unravel the topic from there.

… is now available.

… is now available.

… is now available (18MB!). Note that because of loss of battery power the last couple of minutes are missing.

Paul Pietroski. “Character Before Content”. to appear in Content and Modality: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Stalnaker, edited by J. Thomson and A. Byrne, OUP.

“This is a third paper in the same family. The ideas is that a Chomsky-style internalism about linguistic meaning is compatible with Stalnaker’s view that the propositional contents of assertions are sets of possible worlds. Indeed, Stalnaker may offer all we need (and all we are likely to get) in terms a substantive language-independent notion of truth-conditions. And partly for this reason, we should reject the idea that semantics is conventionalized pragmatics. The middle portion of the paper starts to develop a conception of linguistic meanings as “concept construction instructions.” I hope to develop this conception a little more in a monograph, Semantics Without Truth Values.”

Thomas Ede Zimmermann. “Monotonicity in Opaque Verbs”.

“In this paper I will defend a quantificational semantic analysis of the unspecific readings of opaque transitive verbs, i.e. verbs that induce a certain kind of ambiguity with respect to their direct object position: I owe you a horse, Ernest is looking for a lion, Tom’s horse resembles a unicorn, John hired an assistant.”

Angelika Kratzer. “Indefinites and the Operators they Depend on: From Japanese to Salish”. ms, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, final version, July 2004. To appear in G. N. Carlson and F.J. Pelletier (eds.) Reference and Quantification: The Partee Effect. CSLI.

The website for the 2005 LSA Summer Institute at MIT is open now. There is much content yet to come, but we do have the list of courses offered and the list of faculty. We are excited about the program. In a later post, I’ll point out the astonishing cluster of courses in the semantics/pragmatics interface, my own preferred stomping ground.

The institute is running from June 27 to August 5, 2005, in two three-week sessions, with some six week courses spanning both sessions, including my own introduction to pragmatics.

… is now available (18MB!).

… is now available (19+MB!).

Katrin Schulz. “You may read it now or later: A Case Study on the Paradox of Free Choice Permission”. Master Thesis, Master of Logic Program/ ILLC Amsterdam, supervised by Prof. Dr. F. Veltman.

“[T]he thesis pursuits two different but strongly connected aims. First, it tries to account for a notorious problematic observation concerning the interpretation of certain sentences of English: the paradox of free choice permission. More particularly, the intention is to account for this observation in terms of Grice’s theory of conversational implicatures. Secondly, before this theory can be used first it has to be made precise. Here, the intention is to provide a (part-wise) formalization using results from non-monotonic logic.”

Here is Gamut’s definition of the correct use of a statement again:

A speaker S makes correct use of a sentence A in order to make a statement before a listener L just in case:
(i) S believes that A is true;
(ii) S believes that L does not believe that A is true;
(iii) S believes that A is relevant to the subject of the conversation;
(iv) For all sentences B of which A is a logical consequence (and which are not equivalent to A), (i) - (iii) do not all hold with respect to B.

My claim:

For any given B of which A is a logical consequence, condition (ii) cannot be the reason why the speaker did not utter B.

Task:

Explain why. (Email your answer to me by Tuesday 5 pm.)

For your refrigerator door: a handout with Grice’s Maxims.

Ash Asudeh and Christopher Potts. “Honorific marking: Interpreted and Interpretable”. Workshop on Phi features, McGill University, August 28-30, 2004. (Draft #1. Please check with the authors before citing outside of the workshop.)

Ivano Caponigro. “The semantic contribution of wh-words and type shifts: evidence from free relatives crosslinguistically.” (to appear). In Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) XIV. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications, Cornell University.

Free relatives (henceforth, FRs) are embedded non-interrogative wh-clauses like what Adam cooked in Jie tasted what Adam cooked. They are attested crosslinguistically. So far, I have found them in twenty-eight languages besides English. The main goal of this paper is to show that a crosslinguistic investigation of the semantic behavior of FRs sheds light on the semantic contribution of wh-words and gives further empirical support to the existence of type-shifting rules in the grammar whose purpose is to deal with type-mismatches.