Semantics etc.

Terry Parsons has posted an old unpublished classic of his:

“Pronouns as Paraphrases”, unpublished ms, UMass Amherst.

He gives “1979(?)” as the date but I have always seen it cited as 1978.

[I have a copy that Barbara Partee gave me when I was a student and interested in donkey pronouns. I remember her telling me that Terry’s paper is the outcome of a super-seminar on pronouns that took place at UMass in the late 70s.]

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.

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:

Discuss.

I will post my own answer to this homework some time next week. You should then compare your solution to what I say and alert me to any issues you want to discuss.

Starting with Wednesday’s class, we will meet in Room 32-123, which is across the hall from 32-124. The room has a capacity of 318, so it’s a bit of spatial overkill, but we should be more comfortable there.

Today’s slides and a handout of the same material are now available online. [No audio because of a malfunction.]

Today’s slides, a handout of the same material, and an audio file of the lecture are now available online.

The most appropriate reading in preparation for Wednesday’s class is

Gamut, L. T. F. (1991). Logic, Language, and Meaning. Chicago University Press. vol. 1, ch. 6 “Pragmatics: Meaning and Usage”, sections 6.1 to 6.8, pp. 195 — 212.

A scanned copy is available online.

The readings for this course are all available electronically: freely on the web, or through the publisher when connected from MIT, or in a password-protected area of this website. You will need the login information from page 3 of the syllabus handed out in class.

After today’s class, please sign yourself up for the E-Mail list at the link handed out in class (page 1 of the in-class syllabus).

Today’s edition of the comic “Non Sequitur” has this line in it:

You have 1,227 messages of which,#[1] only two aren’t so mind-numbingly moronic that they can be read without making your head explode.

This is another example of how too many negations tax the semantic performance of the linguistic brain.

Think about it. The writer is first identifying the property of messages that they are so mind-numbingly moronic that they cannot be read without making your head explode. And then, he wants to say that only two of 1,227 messages do not have that property. But as soon as he tries to do that, the negation on can vanishes.

Compare his sentence to what it should “really” be:

You have 1,227 messages of which, only two aren’t so mind-numbingly moronic that they cannot be read without making your head explode.

Trying to process these sentences certainly threatens to make my head explode.

[1]: What’s with that random comma?

Luis Alonso-Ovalle: “Distributing the Disjuncts over the Modal Space”, NELS 35 Proceedings.

KvF: This paper gives some arguments for an implicature + alternatives-based account for free choice disjunction. This relates to the new paper by Aloni & van Rooij that I linked to this morning.

The course syllabus is now available. It incorporates a reading list.

Maria Aloni & Robert van Rooij: “Free Choice Items and Alternatives”, to appear in Proceedings of KNAW Academy Colloquium: Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation, 2004.

Abstract: Extending the proposal made by Schulz (2003), we put forward a pragmatic account of the meaning of existential and universal FC items, where the ‘ignorance or indifference’ inference triggered by the former and the ‘universal’ inference triggered by the latter are treated as implicatures obtained by standard gricean reasoning formalized in terms of the two operations grice and competence. On this account, the implicatures of a sentence are generated with respect to a number of relevant alternatives. The difference between existential and universal FCs is due only to the choice of these alternatives.

Angelika Kratzer. “On the Plurality of Verbs”. June 2005. To appear in: J. Dölling and T. Heyde-Zybatow (eds.), Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin.

Abstract: This paper pursues some of the consequences of the idea that there are two sources for distributive/cumulative interpretations in English. One source is lexical pluralization: All predicative stems are born as plurals, as Manfred Krifka and Fred Landman have argued. Lexical pluralization should be available in any language and should not depend on the particular make-up of its DPs. I suggest that the other source of cumulative/distributive interpretations in English is directly provided by plural DPs. DPs with plural agreement features can ‘release’ those features to pluralize adjacent verbal projections. If there is a lexical source for distributive/cumulative interpretations, there should be instances of such interpretations that are also available for singular DPs. But there should also be cases of distributive/cumulative interpretations that always require the presence of DPs with plural agreement morphology.

What is the role of events in all of this? Events have played a major role in the semantics of plurality since the pioneering work of Barry Schein and Peter Lasersohn. Yet to the present day, there is no consensus about the need of event-based accounts of plurality. Non-event- based analyses of plural phenomena continue to be proposed. The phenomena discussed in this paper all present small or not so small conceptual problems for event-less analyses, but can be given elegant accounts within frameworks that incorporate some version of a Davidsonian event semantics. The hope is that the elegance of proposals made possible in an event semantics might convince those who think that — for reasons we may never fully understand — conceptual elegance, rather than Spartan foundations, may give us a good bet on reality.