Semantics etc.

Guerzoni, Elena and Yael Sharvit (to appear). “A Question of Strength: On NPIs in Interrogative Clauses”, Linguistics and Philosophy. (DRAFT, Oct 2006).

Sabine and I have finished a draft version of our paper on ought. It is a contribution to this year’s workshop on philosophy and linguistics at Michigan (in November). After the workshop, we plan to do wholesale revisions, so any comments people might have would be very much welcome.

Chet Raymo explains how the goal of science is to increase our ignorance: before we do science, we’re not aware of what we don’t know. Once you do science, you answer some questions but many more arise: a glorious increase in ignorance.

This thought might serve as some consolation while I am preparing for my seminar tomorrow: the more I try to understand, the more confused I get. But that’s good. All I need to do now is get my students to the same state of confusion and ignorance.

[Link to Raymo’s essay via James Hrynyshyn]

If I wasn’t teaching a seminar on conditionals, I would be tempted to teach one on presuppositions, given all the new work on the topic. Here’s some of what I have come across, but haven’t really had the time to look at carefully:

• The papers to be discussed at the Ohio State Workshop on Presupposition Accommodation
• Philippe Schlenker’s new work, available at the Semantics Archive, in particular the most recent paper “Be Articulate”.
• Lots of other recent and somewhat less recent work at the Semantics Archive: search for “presupposition”.
• Chris Gauker’s paper “How Contexts Satisfy Presuppositions”
• Update: Add to this Mandy Simons’ new paper “Presupposition without Common Ground”.

Clearly, presupposition is (again) a hot topic. I guess I’ll have to make sure that I get to be involved in our pragmatics course next fall, so I can teach and learn about what’s going on here.

Valentine Hacquard has posted a downloadable version of her dissertation, which is concerned with Modality and its interaction with Tense and Aspect, and focuses on French and Italian:

Valentine Hacquard. 2006. Aspects of Modality. PhD Dissertation, MIT.

Angelika Kratzer has written an overview of the role of situations in natural language semantics for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.