Semantics etc.

Angelika Kratzer in her lecture yesterday referred to old remarks of mine on counting situations. I checked what of that has been published (in my dissertation and in my paper “A Minimal Theory of Adverbial Quantification”) and discovered that there wasn’t much there. So, I dug out some old class notes and cleaned them up just a bit. If anyone is interested in the topic, the document can be downloaded at .

An optional reading for Monday’s class is

• David Lewis: 1979, “Attitudes De Dicto and De Se”.

The version I put online is the original publication (via JSTOR). The paper was reprinted in Lewis’ Philosophical Papers: Volume 1, with a postscript.

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

On Wednesday, we’ll be talking about referential definites. An optional reading for this is Kripke’s paper from the syllabus.

This is from one of today’s slides that we didn’t have time to talk about. It is a variant of the fairy tale modeled after observations by Geoff Nunberg:

Before the mother goat goes out, she instructs the little goats not to open the door to a stranger: “If somebody knocks, ask him to show his hoof in the window, and open the door only if you recognize the hoof as mine.” But since she doesn’t trust them, she decides to put them to the test. She returns and knocks, and the little goats open the door immediately. She chides them and says: “You shouldn’t have opened the door. I could have been the wolf. If I had been the wolf, I would have eaten you all by now.”

The two last sentences are what I am interested in. Think about them: can they be captured in our double-indexed system (one-step or two-step) plus the possibility of diagonalization? If not, what else could we try?

Two people in the class (Yuval and Kristen — thanks!!) have alerted me to an issue with one of the examples I used in class. Recall this:

In the fairy tale “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats”, the little goats are home alone when the wolf knocks on the door and says “Open the door, my dear little goats! I am your mother.”

My point was that here the little goats are not being asked to trust that the proposition “the wolf is our mother” is true but that the proposition “the person at the door is our mother” is true. I showed that this is the diagonal proposition expressed by “I am your mother” in the context of this story.

What Yuval and Kristen both told me is that there is something odd about the wolf saying “I am your mother”. Somehow this sentence suggests that it is not already common ground that the little goats have a mother. Compare Darth Vader telling Luke “I am your father”. What the wolf should have said (to not give the game away) is: “This is your mother”. But then, my story would have been a little more involved since we don’t have an analysis in place for demonstratives like this.

I took the fairy tale example from notes by Irene Heim on indexicality, which we have been using for our formal pragmatics lectures for a while. Now, the original tale is of course in German, since it is from the Brothers Grimm’s collection of fairy tales. I just checked the original and what the wolf says there is even stranger:

Macht auf, ihr lieben Kinder, eure Mutter ist da und hat jedem von euch etwas mitgebracht!

which means “Open up, dear little children, your mother is here and has brought something for each of you!”.

Anyway, I could have made my point with a cleaner example:

[Door bell rings]
A: Yes?
B: I’m from the gas company

Again, the proposition that A is supposed to believe is not that B is from the gas company, but that the person who rang the bell is from the gas company.

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

Reminder: the squib proposal should be send in to me () by the end of the weekend.

As mentioned in class, if you want to read a bit on the initial set-up of intensional semantics, I have two recommendations:

• Chapter 12 of the Heim & Kratzer textbook
• the beginning chapters of the lecture notes on intensional semantics that Irene Heim and I have been developing for some years now

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

In class today I presented the following example:

(1) Once everyone now alive hadn’t been born yet.

I attributed the example to Hans Kamp’s paper “Formal Properties of Now“. This attribution is incorrect. The example Kamp uses to make the point that we need a second time parameter to fix the reference of now is the following:

(2) A child was born who will become ruler of the world.

The idea here is that there is an existential quantifier with two restrictions (child and will become ruler of the world). Because of the time reference of the predicate child we want the existential quantifier to have scope under the PAST tense. But then the predicate will be ruler of the world would be counting forwards from that past time rather than from the utterance time, as it intuitively does. So, Kamp’s formal solution posits the two time indices that we talked about today and then he says that there is a covert now operator on the embedded expression x become ruler of the world.

The example (1) I gave I reproduced partly from memory and from Bob Stalnaker’s brief mention of it in his seminar yesterday. It turns out that something like (1) occurs in the literature but is attributed to Frank Vlach’s dissertation (1973, also UCLA). I currently have no access to Vlach’s dissertation but Johan van Benthem cites him for the following example:

(3) One day, all persons alive now will be dead.

This one might treat as having the following semantic structure:

(4) FUT all (\lambda x. now (x alive)) (\lambda x. x dead)

Again, it seems obvious that the sentence has a reading where we are talking about one future time t’ at which everyone who is alive at the time of utterance is dead. This would give the same argument for double-indexing as the example (1) we used.

Tim Sundell just pointed out to me that there is a problem with (1), which also applies to Vlach’s (4) but not to Kamp’s (2). Tim’s point is this:

We all hear (1) as potentially ambiguous, depending on the relative scope of the existential quantifier over past times — contributed by once (together with all the funky morphology) — and the universal quantifier over individuals now alive. We saw that for the argument for double-indexing to go through, we had to focus on the “surface scope” reading where the claim would be that there is one past time at which everyone now alive hadn’t been born yet. It seems clear that the sentence has such a reading. But, Tim correctly points out, the two scopings actually have the same truth-conditions! If for everyone now alive there is a time at which they weren’t yet alive, then one just takes the relevant time before the birth of the oldest individual in the bunch and voilà! one has the one time at which all of them weren’t born yet. Put another way: try to come up with a situation where one of the scopings makes the sentence true and the other doesn’t — you will find that this task is impossible.

So, does that make (1) unsuitable to make the argument for double-indexing? It is certainly less suitable than Kamp’s actual example (2). In the end, (1) may still work but one would have to show that the scope PAST > everyone now alive is actually available and receives a sensible interpretation. That won’t be easy. Danny Fox has in his book (pp. 70ff.) an example that has the same feature that the two scopings converge in their truth-conditions, but he then provides indirect evidence that both scopings exist:

(5) In our class that consist of 40 students, at least one girl is taller than every boy.

So, one could rescue (1) from irrelevance by using Fox’s kind of evidence to fix the scope of the universal quantifier to below PAST tense and then observe that now still picks up the speech time. But that’s probably too much bother. In any case, as Tim mentioned to me, it is very interesting that we can have strong intuitions of scope ambiguity even with sentences where the two scopings are equivalent.

It is not very hard to fix (1) to make examples that do make the point for double-indexing:

(6) Once everyone now in this room was wearing a hat. (7) Once nobody now alive had been born yet.

(6) clearly has a reading where it claims simultaneous hat-wearing at some point in the past, which is truth-conditionally distinct from the weaker claim that for everyone there is a (potentially different) time in the past at which they wore a hat.

(7) has a sensible reading where it makes the same claim as (1), but here the wide-scope reading for nobody now alive would make the absurd claim that for none of us who are now alive is there a time in the past at which we had already been born.

So, (6) and (7) can be used for the argument without the worries that (1) and (3) raise.

Note finally that the example we used to argue for double world-indexing is also immune from this worry:

(8) It might very well have been that everyone actually here was somewhere else instead.

Here, the truth-conditions of the two scopings clearly diverge, depending on whether there is one possible world where everyone is somewhere else.

I made (8) up this morning. Examples like this were discussed by Crossley & Humberstone (1977) but I don’t have a copy of that here. Max Cresswell (1990) uses:

(9) It might have been that everyone actually rich was poor.

which works just as well as my (8).

REFERENCES

• M.J. Cresswell: 1990. Entities and Indices. Kluwer.
• J.N. Crossley and L. Humberstone: 1977. “The Logic of Actually“. Reports on Mathematical Logic, 8, 11–29.
• J.F.A.K. van Benthem: 1977. “Tense Logic and Standard Logic”. Logique et Analyse, 80, 395-437.
• Danny Fox: 2000. Economy and Semantic Interpretation. MIT Press.
• Hans Kamp: “Formal Properties of Now“. Theoria, 37, 227-273.
• Frank Vlach: 1973. Now and Then: A Formal Study in the Logic of Tense Anaphora. PhD Dissertation. UCLA.

The best preparation for Wednesday’s first class on indexicality is Stalnaker’s paper “Pragmatics”, which is available in a scanned electronic form behind the password.

Today’s slides and a handout of the same material are now available online.

Starting this week, Prag Beer will be held Friday afternoons instead of Tuesday afternoons. Our meeting place will still be the R&D Pub, located on the fourth floor of the Stata Center. Contrary to what we said in class, we will congregate at 4pm (NOT 4:30), and will end whenever the pragmatics gods wish us to end.

Summary:

When: Every Friday, 4pm-??
Where: R&D Pub, 4th Floor, Stata Center

Hoping to see you there.

Kai and Raj

A. The presupposition of (3) is that someone broke the typewriter. That of (4) is that for some salient person x, x is going to Sweden (assuming “Thony” is focussed). Note that the presupposition of the latter sentence cannot be simply that someone other than Thony is going to Sweden (recall Kai’s discussion of Kripke’s famous example of dinner in N.Y.). To convince yourself that these are indeed the right presuppositions, examine their projection behaviour in embedded contexts, eg., Was it Anju who broke the typewriter? If it was Anju who broke the typewriter, I will be very upset.

B. They seem virtually impossible to accommodate, no matter how good the context may be. For example, imagine a future time when M.I.T.’s linguistics department has two students and two faculty members. Now imagine that you are visiting the Institute, and imagine further that it is common ground that, despite our small number of active participants, we are very lively, and every day, at least one of us gives a talk. Imagine further that Lucia is another visitor, and it is common ground that this is so. Now imagine me saying to you (out of the blue): “Lucia gave a talk today too.” Sounds very strange – what do you mean “too?” This strangeness persists despite the fact that it is common ground that at least one of me or my three colleagues gave a talk today.

Surprisingly enough, the above presuppositions are easily accommodated in fictional contexts. Imagine you pick up a new book tomorrow, and the first couple of lines read as follows:

1. The man with the black hat returned to the café. The gazed look in his eye suggested trouble. I was trapped inside, and he was headed my way.
2. I wanted to go to Sweden too, but my many nights at the casino and at the shady bar in Central Square prevented me from being able to do so.
3. It was one of the grand lawyers of Lahore who suggested that I should go to the Hira Mandi, the Diamond Market, the area of the singing and dancing girls, the prostitutes’ area. (This sentence is actually taken from a work of non-fiction. It can be found on p.281 of V.S. Naipaul’s “Beyond Belief”, 1999, a great work of travel- writing published by Abacus (London). It is the first line of a new section in the book – the required presupposition has not at all been mentioned in the prior text)

C. Let us start by examining the difference between the presupposition of the “too” sentence and that of the “my daughter” sentence. We have seen that it is pretty easy to accommodate the “my daughter” presupposition, based on our beliefs about people of Kai’s age, how much we trust Kai, whether or not Kai’s having a daughter is at issue, etc. However, with “too”, there is a specific requirement that for some particular salient x, x is going to Sweden. In a context where there is no such salient proposition, the hearer has nothing to work with – whereas in the “my sister” case the presupposition is clear (whether or not it is satisfied by the common ground is a separate question), in the “too” case the sentence’s presupposition must be filled in by salient features of the context. In the absence of this contextual specification, the hearer is not even in a position to decide whether or not to accommodate, since the prior question of what she is to accommodate remains unresolved. Thus, we might suggest that those presuppositions that require contextual specification of some salient person or property or proposition (as with the definite article, pronouns, demonstratives, too, etc) just can’t be accommodated unless the context fills them in. This is in opposition to the “my daughter” example, which doesn’t require any particular context to furnish any particular salient features in order for the presupposition to be determined.

Unfortunately, it is not at all obvious how this account could be extended to constructions like it-clefts, which have a very definite presupposition (namely, that someone broke the typewriter) that doesn’t seem to require any contextual specification, yet remains strongly resistant to accommodation.

We will expand on these issues in class.

[I am too busy with the LSA institute and my pragmatic course to post much these days, but here's one new piece of work that I thought people might want to look at hot off the presses:]

Bart Geurts and Rick Nouwen. “At least et al. — The semantics of scalar modifiers”, ms, Nijmegen and Frankfurt, July 12, 2005.

Introduction: This paper is concerned with what we propose to call scalar modifiers. Expressions falling under this rubric come in two types: superlative (’at least’, ‘at most’) and comparative (’more than’, ‘less/fewer than’). Our focus of attention will be on superlative and comparative quantifiers, like ‘at most three beers’ and ‘more than two vodkas’, though other uses of scalar modifiers will be taken into account as well.

It might seem that the semantics of scalar modifiers is a rather straightforward matter, but readers of Kay (1992) and Krifka (1999) will be aware that it isn’t. The problems we will concentrate on all have to do with the fact that the distinction between comparative and scalar modifiers runs much deeper than is generally acknowledged. The aim of this paper is twofold: to establish that the differences between comparative and superlative modifiers are profound, and then to explain them. The keystone in our proposal is that superlative but not comparative modifiers are modal expressions.

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

We have changed the syllabus. The advanced topic for this coming Monday July 18 is now “Taxonomy of Triggers”.

Note that David Beaver may possibly make some remarks on the same topic in his class tomorrow.

To read more about accommodation, you could start with the paper by Lewis on “scorekeeping” which is on the syllabus. Additional readings:

• Kai von Fintel: 2000. “What is Presupposition Accommodation”, ms. MIT.
• Mandy Simons: 2003. “Presupposition and Accommodation: Understanding the Stalnakerian Picture”. Philosophical Studies, 112(3):251–278.
• Robert Stalnaker: 2002. “Common Ground”. Linguistics and Philosophy 25(5-6), December 2002, 701-721.

Below, please find Homework #2. This is an optional assignment, and is not required for class credit. The exercise touches on issues we will raise next Monday, so (if you decide to do it) please send your answers to singhr@mit.edu by Sunday, 17 July. Our answer will be posted on the website the following Monday.

Again, feel free to come to either one of us with questions in the meantime.

We will see cases where an assertion A that requires the common ground to be a certain way can be felicitously uttered even when the common ground does not satisfy A’s presuppositional requirements. For example, imagine Kai rushes into class ten minutes late on Wednesday, and utters:

(1) Kai: I’m sorry I’m late. I had to take my daughter to the day care centre.

Kai’s assertion has a presupposition, viz., that Kai has a daughter. Not many of you know or believe (or even have an opinion about) this proposition. Hence, it cannot be common ground, and surely Kai is aware of that.

Nonetheless, few of us have difficulty with it. We “accommodate” the proposition fine enough, that is, we adjust our beliefs to include the proposition that Kai has a daughter, without complaint.

There are at least two factors that could be expected to influence how easy it is to accommodate a proposition presupposed by a speaker’s utterance. (i) The ease of accommodation might depend on how much trust the hearers have in the speaker’s information state about the relevant issue. (ii) The ease of accommodation might also depend on how well the proposition fits into the hearers’ belief systems.

Compare in this light (1) with the following:

(2) Kai: I’m sorry I’m late. I had to take my llama to the vet.

Now, consider a couple more sentences:

(3) Kai: I just found out that it was Anju who broke the typewriter.

(4) Kai: Guess what. Thony is going to Sweden, too.

Exercise:

1. What are the presuppositions of (3) and (4)?
2. Imagine these sentences being uttered in contexts where the presuppositions are NOT satisfied. How easy is it to accommodate the presuppositions of (3) and (4) in such contexts?
3. Can you propose an explanation for the difference in ease of accommodation, if any, between (1) on the one hand and (3)/(4) on the other hand?