Semantics etc.

The program of the OSU workshop on presupposition accommodation with links to the contributed papers and plenty of other information (check out the resources page as well) is now online.

In October, I will participate in the Ohio State University Workshop on Presupposition Accommodation. I was asked to write a paper on accommodation that David Beaver & Henk Zeevat and Zoltán Szabó will be commenting on. The paper was supposed to look at accommodation from a semantic perspective. What I have actually done is to update and expand my 2000 manuscript on accommodation. The paper is thus more of a foundational paper. I try to clarify what part of the job is to be done by semantics and what part by various parts of pragmatics or general purpose reasoning. The semanticist can now get back to the task of solving the projection problem. Thus, this paper is similar in intent to my paper on the role of truth-value judgments in the theory of presuppositions: “Would You Believe It? The King of France is Back!”. There I argue that the primary problem for semantics to solve is the projection problem, while the mapping between semantics and truth-value judgments is far too indirect to serve as empirical bedrock for a theory of presupposition.

In any case, a rough draft of the new paper is now available. I would very much appreciate any comments and criticism.

‘Tis the season of fests:

Rob’s Festshop — A surprise workshop for Rob van der Sandt’s 60th birthday, held May 22 and 23, 2006. The website has some slides and handouts of this two-day workshop. Contributions from Nick Asher, David Beaver, Rob van Rooij, Bart Geurts, Ede Zimmermann, Martin Stokhof, and others.

On May 14th 2006, Kjell Johan Sæbø turned 50. On this occasion, a Festschrift was published to honour him. The book was edited by Torgrim Solstad, Atle Grønn and Dag Haug, all of whom are colleagues of Kjell Johan at the University of Oslo. It contains fifteen articles by younger as well as more established researchers. Most of these are affiliated to the University of Oslo, but the list of contributors also includes research fellows of Kjell Johan’s in Holland and Germany.

Most of the contributions can be downloaded as pdf-files at the festsite:

A Festschrift for Kjell Johan Sæbø —- in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the celebration of his 50th birthday. Edited by Torgrim Solstad, Atle Grønn & Dag Haug.

Let me highlight a few of the papers:

• Blutner on embedded implicatures
• von Stechow, Krasikova, and Penka on anankastic conditionals
• Zimmermann on knowledge and desire

Check the site for the full list.