Semantics etc.

As discussed previously, I have a pitiable Erdös number of 7 and a Bacon number of infinity. In comparison, here’s Geoff Nunberg’s coup:

I belong to the select group of people who can boast of having an Erdös-Bacon number — specifically, 8. Thanks to my co-authorship of papers with Ivan Sag, who wrote a paper with Mark Liberman, who wrote a paper with Joseph Kruskal, who wrote a paper with Alan Hoffman, who wrote a paper with Paul Erdös, I have an Erdös number of 5. Thanks to my appearance in the documentary F*ck, to be released in August, 2006, I have a Bacon number of 3 by various routes, the most gratifying of them:

Geoffrey Nunberg appears in F*ck with Pat Boone, who was in The Cross and the Switchblade (1970) with Erik Estrada, who was in We Married Margo (2000) with Kevin Bacon.

Angelika Kratzer & Elisabeth Selkirk. 2007. “Phase theory and prosodic spellout: the case of verbs”. ms, to appear in The Linguistic Review.

In this paper we explore the consequences of adopting recent proposals by Chomsky 2000, 2001, 2005a, 2005b, according to which the syntactic derivation proceeds in terms of phases. The notion of phase–through the associated notion of spellout–allows for an insightful theory of the fact that syntactic constituents receive default phrase stress not across the board, but as a function of yet-to-be-explicated conditions on their syntactic context. We will see that the phonological evidence requires us to modify somewhat the theory of which functional categories actually define a phase. Patterns of default, syntax-determined, phrase stress are argued to result from a prosodic spellout requiring the highest phrase in the spellout domain to correspond to a major prosodic phrase in phonological representation, and carry major phrase stress. Our proposal is part of a growing family of proposals (Legate 2003, Kahnemuyipour 2004, Selkirk and Kratzer 2005, Wagner 2005, Adger 2006, Ishihara 2006, Truckenbrodt 2006) which seek to explain core aspects of sentence prosody in terms of phase theory.

Paul Portner. “Beyond the Common Ground: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Epistemic Modals”. Slides from a talk at the International Conference on Linguistics in Korea, January 19-20, 2007. See also the references.

Chris Tancredi. “A Multi-Model Modal Theory of I-Semantics — Part I: Modals”. Draft ms, The University of Tokyo, January 21, 2007.

Abstract: This paper provides a semantic analysis of restrictions on quantification into doxastic modals uncovered by von Fintel and Iatridou (2003). The restrictions are made to follow from the architecture of a new theory of semantic interpretation, deriving from an asymmetry in the introduction of doxastic and non-doxastic modal bases. The analysis can be seen as a concrete extension of Kratzer (1991) that adds just enough structure to the semantics to be able to give a principled account of the restrictions on quantifying into doxastic modal statements.

Chris just sent this to me and Sabine, so we haven’t read it yet, but it looks interesting.

I started this web site on January 2, 2003 — four years ago. Since then, there have been 1,204 posts and 313 (non-spam) comments. At irregular intervals, I have moved, upgraded, and switched hosting companies and blogging software. This time around, the make-over is minimal: a switch to a simpler stylesheet (appropriately called Simplr) and hiding away some complexities.

Let me give an overview of how the site works now:

• The front page shows main articles only, that is entries which are more than just news flashes. The plan is for these to be more frequent than in the past. A full listing of these articles is available through the “Articles” tab.
• The news updates page has all the semantics news that’s fit to print.
• The geek notes page obviously has the computer-geeky stuff on it.
• The semantics resources page continues to provide a list of homepages of researchers in the field and will perhaps grow to include links to other valuable resources.
• The about page is my professional homepage, with the usual info.
• New: The feeds page gives a number of options for receiving updates.
• The footer of each page on the site has the traditional sidebar stuff, including what’s new at the Semantics Archive, my del.icio.us links, etc.

Chris Potts has a target article forthcoming in Theoretical Linguistics:

• Christopher Potts: “The Expressive Dimension”, ms, September 2006.

There will be peer commentary and responses by Chris. As comments become available on the web, I’ll list them here:

• Bart Geurts: “Really Fucking Brilliant”
• Philippe Schlenker: “Expressive Presuppositions”.

Chris Potts has a searchable collection of interesting linguistic examples: “Linguistic Oddities”. Here’s one (a real-life i-within-i case, discovered by Barbara Partee):

This lanky seventeenth of his billionaire father’s twenty-four sons had done much to inspire young Muslims with the romance of anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.

Chris’ project is of course reminiscent of Jim McCawley’s fabulous Linguistic Flea Circus, which Jim distributed once a year (a collected edition was once published by the Indiana University Linguistics Club).

The twenty-second annual conference of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics was held at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on July 2-3, 2006. The conference was organized by Malka Rappaport Hovav, along with a workshop on Syntax, Lexicon and Event Structure. The conference and workshop celebrated the 80th birthday of Anita Mittwoch. The proceedings volume for the conference with full papers in PDF is now online.