Semantics etc.

This weblog will be undergoing some changes in the next few weeks:

• it will be moving towards being a group blog on semantics etc. rather than Kai’s personal site
• Kai’s home page has moved to http://kaivonfintel.org
• the geek notes part is now a stand-alone blog called “The Academic Geek” for those who are interested in that kind of thing

Thony Gillies and I have finally finished the overdue draft of our indeterminacy proposal about the semantics and pragmatics of the epistemic modal might: “Might Made Right”. Check it out and please give us feedback. We’re told the very final version is needed towards the end of the fall.

There is a special issue of The Linguistic Review in the works, with a set of invited papers on the topic of universals from the perspective of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Lisa Matthewson and I just finished the manuscript of the semantics article:

• Kai von Fintel & Lisa Matthewson. 2007. “Universals in Semantics”. ms, to appear in a special issue of The Linguistic Review devoted to universals.

We found that there hadn’t been a survey of universals in semantics in a formal/theoretical vein and so we decided to fill the gap, at least temporarily until some burning soul takes on the task. The manuscript is 64 pages long, including 16 pages of bibliography.

The article is now going off to be reviewed, but we would like to enlist the help of semanticists everywhere to take a look at the manuscript and help us. So, let us know if there are any errors, if we forgot to mention something (although at this point and this length, we’ll probably only be able to add a footnote here and there), or anything else you would like us to think about. Cheers!

“Anatomy of a Modal Construction”, an article I wrote with Sabine Iatridou has now appeared in Linguistic Inquiry. The future-proof link is doi:10.1162/ling.2007.38.3.445. Thanks to the MIT Copyright Amendment Form, I can post the final version of the article here.