‘Tis the season of list making. Leiter, for example, has people list the most significant books in philosophy over the last quarter century, divided by subfields.
I am starting to prepare for next semester’s advanced semantics course. One thing I plan to hand out at the beginning is a list of the essential readings in semantics (including pragmatics and philosophy of language). I have made a start, drawing mostly on the table of contents of Portner and Partee’s Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings and Veltman’s list of 40 classics in formal semantics and pragmatics. I put the result up for your perusal.
Please use the comments (or email, if you prefer) to suggest additions, subtractions, substitutions. In the next iteration, I plan to add some more recent “instant classics” to lead students closer to current research. I would especially like suggestions for such articles.
In a separate post, I will comment on what it means for the field that such a list seems like a useful idea (I doubt that a similar thought would occur to a nuclear physicist).
Update Routledge has just published a huge 6 volume set “Semantics”, edited by Javier Gutirrez-Rexach, containing “the most important contributions to semantic theory ranging from Gottlob Frege’s 1892 essay “On Sense and Reference” to recent cutting-edge scholarship from leading journals in the field”. The table of contents lists 101 items. This could serve as a useful long short list to select readings from. I have found it difficult to link directly to a page with the contents of this collection, so I uploaded the table of contents myself.
Update See this entry and associated comments at Lambda the Ultimate. It appears that my comments are already anticipated with bated breath.
Well, maybe I live in the burning present along with the physicists: the things that come to mind as potential additions to Kai’s preliminary list are all new(ish) and
(i) beautiful; or
(ii) already having a huge impact.
Happily, most have properties (i) and (ii).
CONTEXT-DEPENDENCY
von Fintel, Kai. 1999. NPI licensing, Strawson-entailment, and context-dependency. Journal of Semantics, 16(2):97-148.
CROSS-LINGUISTIC SEMANTICS
Bittner, Maria. 1994. Cross-linguistic semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 17(1):53-108.
DYNAMICS
Dekker, Paul. 1993. Existential disclosure. Linguistics and Philosophy 16(6):561-587.
INDEXICALS
Schlenker, Philippe. 2003. A plea for monsters. Linguistics and Philosophy 26(1):29-120.
INTONATIONAL MEANING
Buering, Daniel. 1999. Topic. In Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt, eds., Focus — Linguistic, Cognitive, and Computational Perspectives, 142–165. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gunlogson, Christine. 2001. True to Form: Rising and Falling Declaratives as Questions in English. PhD thesis, UC Santa Cruz.
PRESUPPOSITIONS
Beaver, David Ian. 2001. Presupposition and Assertion in Dynamic Semantics. Stanford, CA: CSLI
QUANTIFICATION
von Fintel, Kai. 1994. Restrictions on Quantifier Domains.
PhD thesis, UMass Amherst. Published by the GLSA.
Jacobson, Pauline. 1999. Towards a variable-free semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 22(2):117-184.
I could add to this list indefinitely.
December 21st, 2003, at 11:33 am #Thanks for the suggestions, on most of which I completely agree.
But we can’t add to the list indefinitely! My idea is that these are the essential readings that a semanticist should read in the first three years of graduate work. On top of that, they will be reading work in other areas and cutting edge work on their generals paper topic and on other specific interests. So, we can’t make the list too long.
Nevertheless, I think I will add most of your well-chosen suggestions to my list. (I am somewhat wary of books and dissertations because of their length).
December 21st, 2003, at 12:09 pm #Dear Kai,
Nice post.
Why not Kratzer’s contribution on conditionals (and modality ?) on the handbook edited by Wunderlich and von Stechow? It’s far more succint than “The Notional …” Are we just focusing on original work (as opposed to handbook-type) ?
December 29th, 2003, at 6:15 pm #I share Kai’s concerns about having books and dissertations on this list. If they are truly worth a spot, then they demand many months with furrowed brows. So here are replacements for two of the long items on my earlier list:
Beaver, David Ian. 1997. Presupposition. In Johan van Benthem and Alice ter Meulen, eds., Handbook of Logic and Language, 939–1008. Cambridge, MA and Amsterdam: MIT Press and North-Holland.
a first-rate primer for Gazdar, Karttunen, Heim,
van der Sandt, and others
Gunlogson, Christine. 2002. Declarative questions. In Brendan Jackson, ed., Proceedings of SALT 12. Ithaca, NY: CLC Publications.
the essence of her dissertation
December 30th, 2003, at 10:22 am #