Semantics etc.

This is a gripping one hour webcast from earlier today in which neurosurgeons at Children’s Hospital Boston remove a brain tumor employing functional mapping of the cortex on a 13-year-old boy.

When I spent my days puzzling over why only John licenses NPIs and then I read that real scientists are successfully cloaking objects and teleporting bits of matter over non-negligible distances, I do start to wonder whether I shouldn’t just go into gardening. Why don’t we get to do fun stuff like that?

Just kidding. Once they get us to some distant inhabited planetary system, they’ll need on-board linguists who can establish communication with the 8-legged aliens. So, back to Strawson Entailment …

The Georgetown University Round Table on Languages and Linguistics (GURT 2007) will focus on little words. I will give a plenary talk on “If: The Biggest Little Word”. The abstract deadline for contributed papers and posters is November 10, 2006.

Larry Horn has posted some new papers under the rubric “Selected 21st Century Publications”, including the following two:

• Laurence R. Horn. 2006. “Toward a Fregean pragmatics: Voraussetzung, Nebengedanke, Andeutung”. ms, to appear in L. Horn & I. Kecskes (eds.), Explorations in Pragmatics: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Interculural Aspects (Mouton).
• Laurence R. Horn. 2006. “ONLY connect: How to unpack an exclusive proposition”. ms, to appear in a Festschrift for Jay Atlas edited by Martin Hackl and Robert Thornton, Oxford University Press.

Anna Papafragou. 2006. “Epistemic Modality and Truth Conditions”. Lingua, 116(10): 1688–1702. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2005.05.009.

Abstract: Within the linguistics literature it is often claimed that epistemic modality, unlike other kinds of modality, does not contribute to truth-conditional content. In this paper I challenge this view. I reanalyze a variety of arguments which have been used in support of the non-truth-conditional view and show that they can be handled on an alternative analysis of epistemic modality.

Note that there are three handouts from talks given by me and my co-authors that play a crucial role in Papafragou’s paper. I have two thoughts about this: (i) yeah for the web which makes scientific communication so much easier, and (ii) high time for some of those handouts and talks to be superceded by real papers (yes, “CIA Leaks” and “Epistemic Modality for Dummies” are a start but there is more to come).

A new comprehensive NSF report on doctoral education in the US:

“U.S. Doctorates in the 20th Century” — a 143 page/3.1MB file!

Short description at Inside Higher Ed.

Not much about linguistics in particular in there:

On p. 81, we find out that from 1920 to 1999 6,777 PhDs were awarded, 6,484 of which were awarded after 1960. The growth of PhDs in Linguistics is as follows:

1960–64: 246
1965–69: 492
1970–74: 848
1975–79: 867
1980–84: 873
1985–89: 918
1990–94: 1,095
1995–99: 1,145

I haven’t computed the growth rate but an eyeball comparison to some other sciences indicates that linguistics might be growing a bit faster than older sciences. (Linguistics is classified as an “other social science” rather than among the humanities or with psychology under cognitive science — a term that doesn’t appear in the report).

Interestingly, philosophy — which I have always thought, based on anecdotal evidence, is a much bigger field — hasn’t produced all that many more PhDs: 11,141 since 1960 and 1,911 from 1995-1999 (and the numbers go up and down in the 5 year periods since 1960). So, it’s less than twice as strong as linguistics, which is a smaller difference than I would have suspected.

The answering machine has of course been quite fruitful as a device to probe the semantics and pragmatics of indexical expressions. See for example:

Alan Sidelle. 1991. “The Answering Machine Paradox”. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, pp. 525–539.

Stefano Predelli. 1998a. “I am not here now”. Analysis, 58(2): 107–115.

Stefano Predelli. 1998b. “Utterance, Interpretation and the Logic of Indexicals”. Mind & Language, 13(3): 400–414.

Let me add to this the time machine scenario. Imagine you had a correspondent who lives two months in the future from now (December 2006). One thing I would ask that correspondent has to do with an event that is going to happen a month from now, in my future but my correspondent’s past. Here’s my question to my friend in the future:

Who won the election?

But note that I could also ask my friend this:

Who will win the election?

To my ears, both ways of putting the question are fine. Bonus points for anyone who can tell a convincing story about the semantics and pragmatics of tense that will cover this case. [I have no idea whether this is easy or hard. Questions of tense scare me and so I try to avoid thinking about them.]

As you all know, Alex Doonesbury is now a freshman at MIT. Yesterday and today she has been showing Zipper Harris around campus. Today, they’re in front of the Stata Center, my place of work:

[NB: I don't actually think that "Building 32" is used more widely than "Stata" -- which certainly is a departure for MIT, where everything is talked about by numbers and abbreviations.]

Sabine and I just finished the final revisions of our paper on the Sufficiency Modal Construction as in To get good cheese in Boston, you only have to go to the North End. The paper will appear some time next year in Linguistic Inquiry.

An older, more exploratory, and lengthier version (but with a shorter title) appeared as a working paper in 2005. We will continue to make the old version available, because it does contain some interesting cross-linguistic investigations and open puzzles.

We started working on this paper in 2002, so it’s good to have put the final touches on it.

I have just done a little bit of housekeeping of the Semantics Resources page, adding some people and updating quite a few homepages, particularly because people have moved jobs or just web addresses. I would appreciate it if people could look at the list of homepages and let me know of any inaccuracies and omissions. I am particularly interested in getting suggestions about junior semanticists, advanced graduate students especially, who should be added to the directory.