A weblog on semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and intersections thereof
Each of the talks will be 40 minutes long. There will be 10 minutes of comments from a designated commentator and then 10 minutes for questions and discussion from the audience.
All contributors were asked to provide (drafts of) their papers by June 15, 2005. The papers were made available to the designated commentators at that time.
Here is the program for the workshop, with links to draft papers or handouts:
| 8.30 | Registration and Breakfast |
| 9.00 | Danny Fox & Martin Hackl “The Universal Density of Measurement” Comments by Roger Schwarzschild |
| 10.00 | Benjamin Spector “Exhaustive Interpretations: What to Say and What Not to Say” (handout, slides) Comments by Irene Heim |
| 11.00 | Coffee Break |
| 11.30 | Bob Stalnaker “Conditional Propositions and Conditional Assertions” Comments by Thony Gillies |
| 12.30 | Lunch Break (on your own in Harvard Square) |
| 2.00 | Sophia Malamud “Arbitray Monster: You and One“(handout) Comments by Pranav Anand |
| 3.00 | Cleo Condoravdi “Not Knowing or Caring Who” Comments by Kai von Fintel |
| 4.00 | Coffee Break |
| 4.30 | Gennaro Chierchia “Aspects of Recursive Pragmatics: Managing Multiple Alternative Sets” (related paper) Comments by Polly Jacobson |
| 5.30 | Angelika Kratzer “Covert Quantifier Restrictions in Natural Languages”(slides) Comments by Sally McConnell-Ginet |
The location for the workshop is Jefferson Hall, Room 250, which is on the Harvard campus, behind the Science Center. Here is a map, with the location of Jefferson Hall highlighted.
The workshop starts with a small breakfast at 8:30am. The first talk starts at 9am. The workshop ends at 6:30pm.
The workshop is open to anyone, regardless of whether they are registered for the LSA institute or not. There will be a registration fee of $15 for students and $20 for faculty — the fee will help defray logistical and catering costs. The workshop is partly funded by the Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at MIT.
This one-day workshop will be held on July 15, 2005 as part of the 2005 LSA Institute at MIT and Harvard. The workshop will bring together researchers in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language to discuss the role of context in interpretation.
Barbara Partee reports from the First Annual Workshop on Formal Semantics in Moscow (FSIM):
The first annual workshop “Formal Semantics in Moscow”, organized by a team of young Russian linguists with mentoring by Barbara Partee, was held at Moscow State University on Saturday April 23. The workshop was informal and friendly, like the student-run New England Semantics workshops; there were 12 papers and attendance of about 30. Anna Verbuk gave a paper, and there were papers from Leipzig and from St. Petersburg as well as from Moscow. Everyone was delighted with the results.
Barbara’s full report is available in pdf-format.
[Update: The call for papers just appeared on LINGUIST list.]
On July 15, during the 2005 LSA Institute at MIT and Harvard, we will hold a one-day workshop on “Context and Content — Topics in Formal Pragmatics”.
The workshop will bring together researchers in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language to discuss the role of context in interpretation. Possible topics of focus include:
The invited speakers are
Each of the talks will be 40 minutes long. There will be 10 minutes of comments from a designated commentator and then ample time for questions and discussion from the audience.
We would welcome abstracts for a small number of contributed papers. Abstracts should be no longer than 3 pages (including examples and references) in a legible font. Only electronic submissions of pdf files will be accepted.
Abstracts should be sent to
Important dates:
On Monday, I gave a talk on tense in conditionals at Cornell, as a guest lecture in a seminar on tense and time taught there jointly by Dorit Abusch and Zoltan Szabo. This is a new topic for me and I didn’t pretend to have any original thoughts, just trying to lay out some of the questions and some lines of thinking about them that appeal to me. Eventually, this will presumably be a chapter in my book about the semantics and pragmatics of conditionals. A handout and also an MP3 audio file are available online.
This was hidden away in today’s Sunday Boston Globe:
LINGUISTICS MATTERS: When Brandeis University officials put forward a proposal that would have made drastic cuts in certain fields, including closing the linguistics major, a faculty review panel said that some professors were so demoralized they were thinking about taking other jobs. Brandeis gave up on the plan in face of opposition, but now the chairman of the linguistics program, Ray Jackendoff, has taken a job at Tufts after 34 years at Brandeis. Jackendoff said the failed attempt to cut his program had not driven him out, but he was clearly not impressed with the administration’s commitment to his field. “At Brandeis, I was pretty much locked into the same program I’ve had for many years,” he said. “Political problems” led to the departure of some of his colleagues in the early 1990s, when Jackendoff said the graduate program was shuttered. Jackendoff, 60, will become codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts, where he said the administration seems excited about the field. Brandeis is now scrambling to figure out who will teach linguistics classes next year, since the program’s other professor is on leave, but a spokesman said that Jackendoff will probably be replaced.
[Boston Globe, Education Section: "Campus Insider" by Marcella Bombardieri, April 24, 2005]
As announced in class today, there will be no class next Tuesday 4/26, since I will be on my way back from Ithaca then. Sorry for the late notice.
The examples of sportscasters’ present indicative counterfactuals are discussed in this old entry on my blog.
Now I’m tempted to work these into my talk on tense in conditionals at Cornell.
The paper by Partee on tense is now available.
Robert van Rooy & Katrin Schulz. “Only: Meaning and implicature”, manuscript to appear in a collection on questions and answers edited by Paul Dekker et al. A very short version of this paper appeared in the proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 2004
The issue of how to account for the interpretation of ‘only’ has always been exciting and challenging. Over the years many sophisticated proposals have been brought forward, but ‘only’ always managed to strike back by exposing another new and strange property. In this paper we will not focus on new extraordinary data and their treatment. Instead, we will argue that there is a way to approach the meaning of ‘only’ that is faithful to classical insights and observations but still can deal with well-known challenges.
The New York Times reports on a Norwegian philanthropist, Fred Kavli, who is endowing three new Nobel-like Prizes: in the fields of astrophysics, neuroscience and nanoscience.
Semantics again got passed over.
I just put up the beginnings of a website for the course I am teaching during the LSA summer institute, which takes place at MIT and Harvard this summer. I’ll be teaching a six week course on pragmatics in linguistic theory.
This is basically a condensed version of the regular pragmatics course that we teach here at MIT. There are going to be 12 90-minute course meetings. The course will be divided into 3 units with 4 course meetings each. We will cover three topics:
In each unit, we will spend 3 meetings on developing basic concepts and formal tools. Then, in the 4th meeting of each unit, we will introduce and discuss some current “cutting edge” work in the area.
The institute is chock-full with interesting courses, conferences, and other events, too much to sample here. So, I’ll just mention some courses related to mine.
There is a six week introductory course on semantics taught by Gennaro Chierchia. And then there are a number of pragmatics-related three week courses:
And of course there is plenty of semantics, syntax, phonology, etc. Check out the website for the institute for more info.
There are 12 course meetings. The course will be divided into 3 units with 4 course meetings each. We will cover three topics:
In each unit, we will spend 3 meetings on developing basic concepts and formal tools. Then, in the 4th meeting of each unit, we will introduce and discuss some current “cutting edge” work in the area.
LSA.311 is a six week course running for the entire duration of the Institute.
There is also a six week course on semantics taught by Gennaro Chierchia.
There are a number of pragmatics-related three week courses:
Formal theories of conversational implicature, presupposition (and context change), and indexicality. Special emphasis on the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. We will devote some time to current ongoing work, to illustrate how the basic concepts of pragmatics are involved in cutting edge work. The course is appropriate for students interested in work in syntax/semantics and for students interested in the philosophy of language. We will presuppose technical material more or less on the level of Heim & Kratzer (1998), as well as familiarity with the possible-worlds semantics of modal and attitude constructions.
This is the course website for LSA.311 “Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory”, a course that will be taught by Kai von Fintel (bio) as part of the 2005 LSA Institute, which takes place June 27 — August 5, 2005 at MIT and Harvard.
… are available online. Lots of goodies. Get them while they’re hot.
For the uninitiated, SuB is “Sinn und Bedeutung”, one of the premier natural language semantics conferences in Europe.
Chapter 6 of the lecture notes on the de dicto — de re ambiguity is now downloadable.
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