Semantics etc.

At the APA Eastern Division meeting tomorrow, I am joined by Thony Gillies and John MacFarlane in giving an “informational session” on epistemic modals. I am in charge of providing the linguistic perspective. I have put online my slides and some selected references.

Update: Thanks to the incompetence of Delta Airlines, I am unable to present my talk in New York, so the slides are all there is.

Another Update: Brian Weatherson jumped in and presented my slideshow. By all accounts, he did a fantastic job. Thanks, Brian! Check out his post-mortem, especially about the evidential aspects of epistemic modals.

I just received my autographed copy of Paul Elbourne’s book Situations and Individuals.

MIT Press has a table of contents with some sample chapters to download.

This is a great book (of course, I am not unbiased, having been on Paul’s thesis committee). The Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal plays a crucial role in the solution of the Problem of Indistinguishable Participants (a.k.a. the bishop problem).

Mandy Simons has a number of updates on her website. One paper I highly recommend is this:

“Observations on embedding verbs, evidentiality, and presupposition”. (Under review.)

This paper discusses the semantically parenthetical use of clause-embedding verbs such as see, hear, think, believe, discover and know. When embedding verbs are used in this way, the embedded clause carries the main point of the utterance, while the main clause serves some discourse function. Frequently, this function is evidential, with the parenthetical verb carrying information about the source and reliability of the embedded claim, or about the speaker’s emotional orientation to it. Other functions of parenthetical uses of verbs are discussed.Particular attention is paid to the parenthetical uses of semi-factive and factive verbs. It is demonstrated that when so used, these verbs are in no way presuppositional; that is, there is no presumption, or even pretense, that their complements have common ground status. It is further demonstrated that the loss of presuppositionality is not accompanied by a loss of factivity: in their parenthetical use, these verbs are non-presuppositional, but still factive. It is argued that this non-presuppositional use of factive verbs provides support for the (minority) view that presupposition is not a conventional property of lexical items.

Mandy’s paper connects to two concerns of mine: the idea that many people have that epistemic modals do not contribute to truth-conditions but are evidential markers of sorts, and the question of whether conventional/semantic presuppositions are always pragmatic presuppositions (and the other way round). I bet that I will have occasion to cite and comment on her paper very soon in my own work.

Arnim von Stechow. “Temporal comparatives: früher ‘earlier’/später ‘later’”. Talk presented at the workshop ‘Tense and Mood’, Stuttgart, December 3 2005.

There is a rich literatur about before/after, but I am not aware of a comparable literature about earlier/later. The talk develops a degree semantics for the antonyms früh ‘early’ and spät ‘late’ and derives the meanings of the comparative forms for these adjectives. I defend Heim’s negation theory of antonymy. I define a new positive operator Pos that applies to the positive and the negative pole of an antonym pair without any ad hoc stipulation. Each context determines a delineation interval L that separates the negative from the positive pole of an antonymy pair. Pos applied to a set of degrees D says that D holds of every degree in the interval L. A number of non trivial constructions are analysed.

Kjell Johan Sæbø. 2005. “The Logical Basis of Exclamatives”. Presentation at the 3ième Journée de Sémantique et Modélisation, ENS, Paris, March 17-18, 2005.

Anthony Gillies: “Counterfactual Scorekeeping”. ms.

Counterfactuals are typically thought–given the force of Sobel sequences–to be variably strict conditionals. I go the other way. Sobel sequences and (what I call) Hegel sequences push us to a strict conditional analysis of counterfactuals: counterfactuals amount to some necessity modal scoped over a plain material conditional, just which modal being a function of context. To make this worth saying I need to say just how counterfactuals and context interact. No easy feat, but I have something to say on the matter.

The proceedings of the 2005 Amsterdam Colloquium are available online. Very cool. Almost as good as being there.