Semantics etc.

John Burgess has posted the manuscript of his forthcoming textbook on philosophical logic, including tense logic, modal logic, and an extensive chapter on conditional logic:

• John P. Burgess. 2008. Philosophical Logic. Unpublished book ms, forthcoming from Princeton University Press, Foundations of Twenty-First Century Philosophy Series, general editor Scott Soames. [also: problems]

Angelika Kratzer is preparing a book on modals and conditionals for Oxford University Press, bringing together her classic works on this topic and much more. A first chapter, an updated version of “What must and can must and can mean”, is available on the Semantics Archive.

This is the first chapter of a book manuscript. The book will bring together most of my previous work on the topic of modals and conditionals. The original work has been edited for style, cut or merged to avoid overlap, translated if necessary, and supplemented with additional material for purposes of clarification. In addition, there are a few new chapters connecting the older work to the current state of the art. I will post drafts of the chapters as they become available. Any comments are highly appreciated.

Mandy Simons has two new papers on her website:

• Presupposition and Cooperation (Under Review)

  “In this paper, I propose a novel view of presuppositions as those propositions which an interpreter must take the speaker to accept in order to take the speaker to be fully cooperative, in the Gricean sense.”

• A Gricean View on Intrusive Implicatures. To appear in Klaus Petrus (ed.), Meaning and Analysis: New Essays on H. Paul Grice.

  “This paper explores one of the long-standing objections to Grice’s account of conversational implicature: the case of purported implicatures which are apparently generated by subordinate clauses, or which fall under the scope of a logical operator (typically both). Such cases, for reasons to be detailed below, pose a challenge to Grice’s account. While those who have posed the challenge, ranging from advocates of truth conditional pragmatics to strict compositionalists, have a wide variety of views as to the correct account of the data, they are united in reaching the same negative conclusion: that Grice’s account cannot be extended to intrusive implicatures.
  
  In this paper, I will argue for a different conclusion. I will suggest that there is a natural modification of Grice’s model which allows for the generation of implicatures from non-asserted sentence-parts. The goal of the paper is to articulate this modification and apply it to some sample cases. This is done in part 2 of the paper. In part 1, I introduce the cases to be investigated and explain in a little more detail what issues they raise.”

MIT Linguistics now has a weekly newsletter. Following the model of WHASC (What’s Happening at Santa Cruz) and WHISC (What’s Happening in South College), our newsletter is, of course, called Whamit!.