Shoichi Takahashi & Danny Fox have a new paper on ellipsis:
- Shoichi Takahashi & Danny Fox. 2005. “MaxElide and the Re-binding Problem”.
Conclusion: We have claimed that MaxElide is a constraint that forces deletion of the biggest deletable constituent under all circumstances. We also claimed that this constraint applies to those constituents which are subject to the parallelism condition (Parallelism Domains). Parallelism Domains must be bigger than ECs in Re-binding contexts, but in other contexts, they can be the ECs themselves. This explains the fact that the effects of MaxElide are observable only in Re-binding contexts. The difference in the size of Parallelism Domains is a corollary of context-sensitive parallelism conditions (such as Rooth’s 1992b) in a system that postulates variables and variable names. Thus, we have suggested that our results can be taken as evidence for such systems.
Luisa Martí has a new paper on Spanish algunos:
- Luisa Martí. 2005. “Spanish algunos and the syntactic sensitivity of indefiniteness”.
Abstract: This paper argues that the grammar must make it possible for indefinites to take scope outside of syntactic islands in a way that is sensitive to those islands. This is because there exist languages, like Spanish, in which whether an indefinite can take scope outside an island or not depends on the island it is embedded in. In particular, the Spanish plural indefinite “algunos” gives rise to both collective and distributive readings outside some, though not all, islands. The facts about “algunos” suggest that syntactically insensitive ways of achieving wide scope (e.g., choice functions, as in Kratzer 1998, Matthewson 1999, Reinhart 1997, or Winter 1997; domain restriction to a singleton set, as in Schwarzschild 2002 (cf. also Breheny 2003); referential interpretations, as in Fodor and Sag 1982, etc.) are, at the very least, not the only option languages can choose in order to achieve indefinite wide scope. I suggest treating “algunos” as an existential quantifier and deriving its wide scope out of the relevant syntactic islands via a QR rule that is sensitive to these islands and to the particulatities of the quantifiers involved (Relativized QR). I point out that in this kind of approach constraints need to be placed on the distribution of distributivity operators. I suggest that more cross-linguistic empirical work in this area is needed, since very often claims about the purported island insensitivity of indefinites are based on data that concern only a rather small set of islands.
I was asked to write an article on “Modality and Language” for the second edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Don Borchert for MacMillan publishers. Here is the entry as sent off today:
- Kai von Fintel. 2005. “Modality and Language”. to appear in Donald M. Borchert (ed.) Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Second Edition, MacMillan.
I intend to update the online entry even after the official publication of the encyclopedia. So, I would welcome any and all comments and/or criticism. Update: There is now a slightly updated version online.
Highly recommended new paper on deontic modality:
- Dilip Ninan. “Two Puzzles About Deontic Necessity”. Forthcoming in New Work on Modality, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 52. Edited by V. Hacquard, J. Gajewski, B. Nickel and S. Yalcin.
[found via Daring Fireball via kottke.org]
The New Yorker has a short piece on fake entries in encyclopedias and dictionaries that serve as traps for would-be plagiarists. The initial example is the entry for “Lillian Virginia Mountweazel” in the New Columbia Encyclopedia, a non-existent “fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled “Flags Up!’”.
Then the investigation turns to the New Oxford American Dictionary, which turns out to have the following fake entry:
esquivalience —- *n. the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities … late 19th cent.: perhaps from French esquiver, “dodge, slink away.”
John Gruber at Daring Fireball adds: “The New Oxford American Dictionary, of course, is the dictionary behind Mac OS X 10.4’s new Dictionary application, and, indeed, there’s an entry for esquivalience, complete with usage examples and fake etymology. (Go ahead and look it up with a Command-Control-D.)” So, I did. Here’s the entry in all its beauty:
[Found via BoingBoing via Making Light]
A list of 736 “essentialist explanations” of the form “Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z”. Some examples:
- English is essentially Norse as spoken by a gang of French thugs.
- German is essentially a language developed by a group of Teutons who gathered in the forest one day to come up with a language that their enemies would have no chance of grasping.
- It is essential, that You the german Syntax and Punctuation right get must.
- Brazilian is essentially Latin without consonants.
etc., etc. Something to while away a rainy day with, while you have lots of more important things to do.
Zoltán Gendler Szabó has three new online papers:
- Entry on “Chomsky”. The Dictionary of American Philosophers
- “On Direct Compositionality”. Comments at Michigan in November 2004 on Pauline Jacobson’s paper on direct compositionality.
- “The Loss of Uniqueness”.
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.
Richard Kayne has three online manuscripts on determiners and similar expressions:
Apropos the ongoing exchange between Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch vs. Jackendoff and Pinker, Mark Liberman writes about the slowness of scholarly conversation as mediated through journals.
He’s quite right. It can be done faster and often is. See my earlier post about the new features at arxiv.org, which is how physicists do their scholarly exchanges.
Also, our experience with our Harlem Paper has been amazing. Since we first posted our notes on the web in March 2004, there have been four or five successive drafts by Arnim von Stechow and his colleagues, there or so papers by Janneke Huitink, a SALT paper by Jon Nissenbaum, and — judging by anonymous abstracts I got to review for Sinn und Bedeutung and NELS — some more work by others yet to be presented. In the same span of time, our own paper has gone through three or four revisions and has been presented at a couple of conferences. The speed of the debate is far from the glacial speed that Liberman was complaining about. Of course, we’re all beating up on each other so much that it is quite conceivable that there won’t be anyone left standing to submit a journal article about this topic.
My old friend and graduate school class mate, Bernhard Rohrbacher, now a labor union attorney in California, is running the National AIDS Marathon on December 11, 2005, in Honolulu, Hawaii. You can sponsor him and read his training log (including his reports on bird-watching while doing his training) at .
The program for Sinn und Bedeutung 10 is now available. Looks like a great conference. Berlin, October 13–15, 2005.
As reported here, here, here, here, and here, the giant open research archive arxiv.org for physics, math, and computer science now supports not just RSS feeds for newly added papers but also trackbacks, which means that if someone posts comments on an archived paper at their website or on their weblog, a link to their page can auto-magically appear on the abstract page at arxiv.org. This is very cool.
I wish that the semanticsarchive had an RSS feed for newly added papers. Trackback would just be icing on the cake.
On September 17, I will be presenting our Harlem Paper at the Rutgers Semantics Workshop. Brian Weatherson will be commenting. So, it was high time for a draft to be sent out to Brian and the other participants of the workshop. Here it is:
Anastasia Giannakidou and Monika Rathert are organizing a star-studded workshop on “QP structure, Nominalizations, and the role of DP”, which will take place December 16th and 17th, 2005 in Saarbrücken.
A tip for a cognitive science novel:
A couple of weeks ago at the ESPP congress in Lund, I presented a paper on Harlem conditionals, in which Sabine and I champion a 1970 paper by Aaron Sloman on the semantics of ought:
- Sloman, Aaron. (1970). “Ought and Better“. Mind, 79(315): 385–394.
In some ways, Sloman anticipated some rudiments of the context-sensitivity story about modals that Angelika Kratzer later developed. Definitely worth a look.
At the conference, David Over told me about the novel Thinks … by David Lodge:
At the fictitious University of Gloucester, science and literature collide in the persons of 40-something Ralph Messenger and Helen Reed. Ralph’s research as the director of cognitive science and his wit and charisma as an explicator of artificial intelligence make him a bit of a star in Britain, and with the ladies. He delights in opportunities for extramarital activities within the confines of the don’t-ask-don’t-tell arrangement he’s established with his wife. [from amazon.com’s reprint of a Publisher’s Weekly review]
Apparently, Ralph Messenger is modeled after none other than Aaron Sloman, who in real life however is not a womanizer, according to David Over. Lodge writes in his Acknowledgments:
My biggest single debt is to Aaron Sloman, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. Aaron patiently answered my elementary questions, gave me copies of his publications, introduced me to his colleagues, welcomed me to his department seminars, escorted me to an eye-opening international conference on consciousness (held appropriately enough at Elsinore) and generally acted as an indispensable guide to consciousness studies in general and artificial intelligence in particular. Though he shares some of the view of my fictional character, Ralph Messenger, on these matters, anyone who knows him will testify that they have nothing else in common.
Michael Wagner. “NPI-Licensing and Focus Movement”. SALT paper.
Conclusion: The distributional pattern of NPIs under VP-only can be captured by a movement theory of focus association, but seems incompatible with an in-situ approach.
From the Google Blog comes the announcement that Google’s system placed first in the annual Machine Translation evaluation by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The tests involved translating from Arabic and Chinese into English.
According to Google’s engineer Franz Och, their “approach was to use statistical translation models learned from parallel text, that is, sets of documents and their translations. The system learns a model automatically from the parallel data. This approach differs from the rule-based approach used by many existing commercial machine translation companies which is based on large sets of handwritten translation rules. We’re very pleased with the results of this evaluation. Our computing infrastructure allows us to do a lot of experiments and work with huge data sets very easily.”
This is the course website for 24.970 “Introduction to Semantics”, a course taught by Luis Alonso-Ovalle and Kai von Fintel in the Fall of 2005 at MIT.
Gary Ostertag reviews the volume Descriptions and Beyond edited by Anne Bezuidenhout and Marga Reimer, which includes my paper on the King of France. Ostertag devotes a section of his review to my paper and to Jay Atlas’ related paper.
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