Semantics etc.

Since I will be away from computers for the holidays, I am disabling comments and trackbacks on this weblog. While MT-Blacklist works pretty well to fend off spam, there’s always something slipping through and I don’t want to come back to a mess. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I just prepared a list of things happening for me next year, for my CV and my homepage. Looks like there’s going to be a lot of stuff:

• Joining the editorial board of the Journal of Semantics.
• MIT, Spring 2005: Teaching 24.903 Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics (undergraduate) and 24.973 Advanced Semantics (graduate).
• Feb 23—Feb 25: Presenting “Might Made Right” (with Thony Gillies) at Workshop on “The (In)Determinacy of Meaning”, Cologne, Germany
• Apr 17: Running the New Jersey Marathon
• Apr 25: Guest lecture in seminar on tense at Cornell University
• May 5 & 6: Colloquia (one in linguistics, one in philosophy) at UT Austin
• Jun 27—Aug 5: Teaching pragmatics at LSA summer institute
• Jul 15: Organizing a workshop on context during the LSA summer institute
• Aug 11—14: Organizing a symposium on conditionals at the annual congress of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology
• MIT, Fall 2005: Teaching 24.970 Introduction to Semantics (graduate).
• Dec: Presenting at American Philosophical Association (APA) session on epistemic modals in New York City

And that doesn’t include plans for writing and research, including first of all the final drafts of “Anatomy of a Modal” with Sabine Iatridou and “Might Made Right” with Thony Gillies. So, after a short vacation over the winter holidays, it’ll be time to roll up the sleeves.

In a couple of days, I will give a colloquium at the Institute of Cognitive Science of the University of Osnabrück. The topic will be “Might Made Right”, a paper on epistemic modals that I am writing with Thony Gillies. I have posted the handout to my web page. We will write the paper in January but the handout should give an idea of the subset of arguments we have against relativistic theories of epistemic modals, such as MacFarlane’s or Egan et.al.’s.

Daniel Rothschild, Russellian Descriptions and Negative Polarity Items. ms, Princeton.

I give an argument against the Russellian semantics for definite descriptions. It goes by arguing that Russellian definite descriptions are not compatible with an account of negative polarity items. Negative polarity items are lexical items including any and ever that can only appear in special semantic contexts. The Russellian semantics for definite descriptions should make it such that negative polarity items can appear within definite descriptions. However, they cannot. I discuss some accounts of negative polarity licensing and explain how they can easily be made compatible with a dynamic view of definite descriptions, but not a Russellian view.

[via Online Papers in Philosophy]

Mentions my analysis based on Strawson Entailment. At a first glance, I would have quite a bit to say about this paper. But that will have to wait for the new year, when I’m back at work. Stay tuned.

Zoltan Gendler Szabo. “The Loss of Uniqueness”. Draft.

Abstract: I begin by briefly reviewing the case against the uniqueness entailment Russell’s theory associates with singular definite descriptions. My main concern here, however, is not so much whether the case stands, but why it matters whether it does. Do we lose anything of substance from Russell’s own insights or the subsequent use to which they were put if we drop the uniqueness clause from his analysis of definite descriptions? Russell himself would not be bothered by this argument: he did not believe that an empirically adequate semantics is possible for natural languages and he was not interested in devising theories that are merely close to being adequate. If despite Russell’s contrary intentions, we are determined to view his theory of descriptions as part of the semantics of English, we need to settle what components of the original view we should hold on to. I argue that the current focus on the particular truth-conditions he gave is misguided — the semantic explanations in On Denoting put almost no constraint on what the truth-conditional content of the definite article might be. We can drop uniqueness and remain true Russellians about descriptions, if we wish. But we should not. In the final section I argue that the Russell-inspired view that descriptions could in principle be eliminated from a language that is equipped with standard quantifiers and the identity predicate is mistaken. Whatever descriptions are, they are not mere devices of quantification.

Arnim von Stechow, Sveta Krasikova, & Doris Penka. “Anankastic Conditionals”. ms.

We propose a new analysis for anankastic conditionals, which are exemplified by the following pattern due to Kjell-Johan Sæbø

a. You have to take the A train if you want to go to Harlem.
b. If you don’t take the A train you can’t go to Harlem.
c. To go to Harlem you have to take the A train.

All these are claimed to be truth conditionally equivalent. The hardest problem is a compositional analysis of (a): what is the role played by “want” in the antecedent? Our proposal starts from the observation that (a) is elliptical. Its overt forms is (a’):

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

The consequent in (a’) contains no “want” and is in fact (c). We propose a counterfactual analysis for (c): the sentence is true if you take the A train in the nearest worlds where you go to Harlem. The want-antecedent in (a) adds a felicity condtion: the sentence can be uttered appropriately only in contexts whose conversational background is compatible with the proposition that you want to go to Harlem. As far as we can see, this analysis solves all the problems that have been discussed in the literature about anankastic conditionals.

The draft contains some responses to the paper on the same topic that I wrote with Sabine Iatridou and to Janneke Huitink’s recent talk on the topic. I suppose it really is time for us to revisit the topic and to respond to this new work.