Semantics etc.

[Hey, it’s almost summer, so how about some diversion from the everyday grind of science?]

Apparently, Mr Justice Peter Smith of London’s High Court embedded his very own code in his judgment in the Da Vinci Code plagiarism case. All puzzle fanatics should download the pdf of the judgment and follow the clues reported in the NY Times article.

[Update: The code has been broken.]

Chris Kennedy asked me to circulate this announcement:

The Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago is pleased to announce a Workshop on Scalar Meaning, to be held May 19-20 at the University of Chicago. Information on the content of the workshop, the location and program, and other details can be found at the workshop website (please note that the times of the talks are subject to minor changes):

http://semantics.uchicago.edu/workshops/scales/

Registration for the workshop is free, but if you are interested in attending, please send an email to Chris Kennedy (ck@uchicago.edu) by Monday, May 15 (if possible) so we can make appropriate arrangements for refreshments.

This workshop is made possible through the generous support of the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 0094263 and 0618917.

Philippe Schlenker. “Scopal Independence: A Note Branching & Island-Escaping Readings of Indefinites & Disjunctions”, accepted for publication with revisions, Journal of Semantics (last modified: April 24, 2006 - revised and shortened version)

Abstract: Hintikka claimed in the 1970s that indefinites and disjunctions give rise to ‘branching readings’ that can only be handled by a ‘game-theoretic’ semantics as expressive as a logic with (a limited form of) quantification over Skolem functions. Due to empirical and methodological difficulties, the issue was left unresolved in the linguistic literature. Independently, however, it was discovered in the 1980s that, contrary to other quantifiers, indefinites may scope out of syntactic islands. We claim that branching readings and the island-escaping behavior of indefinites are two sides of the same coin: when the latter problem is considered in full generality, a mechanism of ‘functional quantification’ (Winter 2004) must be postulated which is strictly more expressive than Hintikka’s, and which predicts that his branching readings are indeed real, although his own solution was insufficiently general. Furthermore, we suggest that, as Hintikka had seen, disjunctions share the behavior of indefinites, both with respect to island-escaping behavior and (probably) branching readings. The functional analysis can thus naturally be extended to them.

Greg Restall points to Lloyd Humberstone’s online draft of a monumental (1259 pages) book on “The Connectives”. Very impressive. Apart from plenty of logical investigations, there is also much of interest about philosophical and even linguistic topics. Mavens will want to look at the sections about disjunction and conditionals especially. I know I will study them.

Susi Wurmbrand. “Infinitives: A future without tense”. Talk given at the Jersey Syntax Circle, Princeton (April 2006).

I argue that i) certain infinitives lack semantic and syntactic tense; ii) future infinitives project a future modal woll syntactically; iii) propositional infinitives project a vacuous syntactic tense domain.

A few minutes of respite from the workday of a linguist:

Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky

The Linguistic Society of America is planning a new online journal of linguistics: eLanguage. They are asking for proposals about the administration of the journal.

The Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America (EC) intends to establish by early in 2007 a new, independent, on-line electronic journal (eLanguage) as a complement to its print journal, Language. The exact structure and format of the new journal remain to be determined, and proposals are solicited from members of the Society who might be interested in editing and administering it, and in participating in its initial definition.

The deadline for proposals is May 1, 2006.

It is now fashionable to argue that a relativistic semantics is correct for predicates of personal taste (Lasersohn) and epistemic modals (MacFarlane, Egan, Hawthorne & Weatherson). One of our students, Tamina Stephenson, has a very nice relativistic paper in the MITWPL volume on New Work on Modality. In a recent conversation with her, I gave her the following example:

A: How’s that new brand of cat food you bought?
B: I think it tastes good, because the cat has eaten a lot of it.

The relativistic approaches expect that in embedding under “think”, the subject should become the judge for the taste predicate. But here, that is clearly not so.

It is interesting that the same freedom doesn’t seem to be there with epistemic “might”. Egan, Hawthorne and Weatherson describe the following scenario:

Ann is planning a surprise party for Bill. Unfortunately, Chris has discovered the surprise and told Bill all about it. Now Bill and Chris are having fun watching Ann try to set up the party without being discovered. Currently Ann is walking past Chris’s apartment carrying a large supply of party hats. She sees a bus on which Bill frequently rides home, so she jumps into some nearby bushes to avoid being spotted. Bill, watching from Chris’s window, is quite amused, but Chris is puzzled and asks Bill why Ann is hiding in the bushes. Bill says

“I might be on that bus.”

In this case, the judge for the “might” is not Bill but Ann. But note that Bill could not possibly say:

“I think I might be on that bus.”

That sentence says that for all Bill knows he is on the bus, which is absurd in the given scenario.

So, there seems to be a clear difference between taste predicates and epistemic “might”.

This past weekend, I was at the Conditionals Conference at UConn, which was lots of fun. I was one of two linguists on the program (Stefan Kaufmann was the other). Instead of talking about my current research paper on conditionals (the Harlem paper), I decided to give a more expository talk about how many linguists view conditionals, namely through the lens of the Lewis/Kratzer/Heim analysis that sees if-clauses as restrictors for modal operators. After introducing that view and Angelika’s conjecture that indicative conditionals, at least those of a particular sort, involve covert epistemic modality, I proceeded to defend that view against the rather mainstream view among philosophers that indicatives do not express propositions, do not have truth-conditions.

I got lots of good feedback and encouragement, which will be helpful when I write this stuff up for the book on conditionals that I am supposedly developing for Oxford’s new “Surveys in Semantics and Pragmatics” series.

For the time being, the slides and some selected references are online.