Lecture 12: Monsters?

Today’s slides and a handout of the same material, and an audio file of the second part of the lecture are now available online.

08.03.05 @ 01:35 PM

Lecture 11: De Nunc and De Se

Today’s slides and a handout of the same material, and an audio file of the lecture are now available online.

08.01.05 @ 04:43 PM

Lewis on de dicto and de se

An optional reading for Monday’s class is

The version I put online is the original publication (via JSTOR). The paper was reprinted in Lewis’ Philosophical Papers: Volume 1, with a postscript.

07.28.05 @ 01:48 PM

Lecture 10: More on Indexicals

Yesterday’s slides and a handout of the same material, and an audio file of the lecture are now available online.

07.28.05 @ 12:54 PM

Reading for Wednesday

On Wednesday, we’ll be talking about referential definites. An optional reading for this is Kripke’s paper from the syllabus.

07.25.05 @ 03:39 PM

A Puzzle about the Wolf

This is from one of today’s slides that we didn’t have time to talk about. It is a variant of the fairy tale modeled after observations by Geoff Nunberg:

Before the mother goat goes out, she instructs the little goats not to open the door to a stranger: “If somebody knocks, ask him to show his hoof in the window, and open the door only if you recognize the hoof as mine.” But since she doesn’t trust them, she decides to put them to the test. She returns and knocks, and the little goats open the door immediately. She chides them and says: “You shouldn’t have opened the door. I could have been the wolf. If I had been the wolf, I would have eaten you all by now.”

The two last sentences are what I am interested in. Think about them: can they be captured in our double-indexed system (one-step or two-step) plus the possibility of diagonalization? If not, what else could we try?

07.25.05 @ 03:38 PM

What the Wolf Should Have Said

Two people in the class (Yuval and Kristen — thanks!!) have alerted me to an issue with one of the examples I used in class. Recall this:

In the fairy tale “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats”, the little goats are home alone when the wolf knocks on the door and says “Open the door, my dear little goats! I am your mother.”

My point was that here the little goats are not being asked to trust that the proposition “the wolf is our mother” is true but that the proposition “the person at the door is our mother” is true. I showed that this is the diagonal proposition expressed by “I am your mother” in the context of this story.

What Yuval and Kristen both told me is that there is something odd about the wolf saying “I am your mother”. Somehow this sentence suggests that it is not already common ground that the little goats have a mother. Compare Darth Vader telling Luke “I am your father”. What the wolf should have said (to not give the game away) is: “This is your mother”. But then, my story would have been a little more involved since we don’t have an analysis in place for demonstratives like this.

I took the fairy tale example from notes by Irene Heim on indexicality, which we have been using for our formal pragmatics lectures for a while. Now, the original tale is of course in German, since it is from the Brothers Grimm’s collection of fairy tales. I just checked the original and what the wolf says there is even stranger:

Macht auf, ihr lieben Kinder, eure Mutter ist da und hat jedem von euch etwas mitgebracht!

which means “Open up, dear little children, your mother is here and has brought something for each of you!”.

Anyway, I could have made my point with a cleaner example:

[Door bell rings]
A: Yes?
B: I’m from the gas company

Again, the proposition that A is supposed to believe is not that B is from the gas company, but that the person who rang the bell is from the gas company.

07.25.05 @ 03:25 PM

Lecture 9: The Two-Step

Today’s slides and a handout of the same material, and a (partial) audio file of the lecture are now available online.

07.25.05 @ 02:55 PM

Squib Proposals

Reminder: the squib proposal should be send in to me (fintel@mit.edu) by the end of the weekend.

07.22.05 @ 10:06 AM

Readings on Intensional Semantics

As mentioned in class, if you want to read a bit on the initial set-up of intensional semantics, I have two recommendations:

07.22.05 @ 09:23 AM

Lecture 8: Indexicals

Today’s slides and a handout of the same material, and an audio file of the lecture are now available online.

07.20.05 @ 03:35 PM

Kamp's actual example

In class today I presented the following example:

(1) Once everyone now alive hadn’t been born yet.

I attributed the example to Hans Kamp’s paper “Formal Properties of Now”. This attribution is incorrect. The example Kamp uses to make the point that we need a second time parameter to fix the reference of now is the following:

(2) A child was born who will become ruler of the world.

The idea here is that there is an existential quantifier with two restrictions (child and will become ruler of the world). Because of the time reference of the predicate child we want the existential quantifier to have scope under the PAST tense. But then the predicate will be ruler of the world would be counting forwards from that past time rather than from the utterance time, as it intuitively does. So, Kamp’s formal solution posits the two time indices that we talked about today and then he says that there is a covert now operator on the embedded expression x become ruler of the world.

The example (1) I gave I reproduced partly from memory and from Bob Stalnaker’s brief mention of it in his seminar yesterday. It turns out that something like (1) occurs in the literature but is attributed to Frank Vlach’s dissertation (1973, also UCLA). I currently have no access to Vlach’s dissertation but Johan van Benthem cites him for the following example:

(3) One day, all persons alive now will be dead.

This one might treat as having the following semantic structure:

(4) FUT all (\lambda x. now (x alive)) (\lambda x. x dead)

Again, it seems obvious that the sentence has a reading where we are talking about one future time t’ at which everyone who is alive at the time of utterance is dead. This would give the same argument for double-indexing as the example (1) we used.

Tim Sundell just pointed out to me that there is a problem with (1), which also applies to Vlach’s (4) but not to Kamp’s (2). Tim’s point is this:

We all hear (1) as potentially ambiguous, depending on the relative scope of the existential quantifier over past times — contributed by once (together with all the funky morphology) — and the universal quantifier over individuals now alive. We saw that for the argument for double-indexing to go through, we had to focus on the “surface scope” reading where the claim would be that there is one past time at which everyone now alive hadn’t been born yet. It seems clear that the sentence has such a reading. But, Tim correctly points out, the two scopings actually have the same truth-conditions! If for everyone now alive there is a time at which they weren’t yet alive, then one just takes the relevant time before the birth of the oldest individual in the bunch and voilà! one has the one time at which all of them weren’t born yet. Put another way: try to come up with a situation where one of the scopings makes the sentence true and the other doesn’t — you will find that this task is impossible.

So, does that make (1) unsuitable to make the argument for double-indexing? It is certainly less suitable than Kamp’s actual example (2). In the end, (1) may still work but one would have to show that the scope PAST > everyone now alive is actually available and receives a sensible interpretation. That won’t be easy. Danny Fox has in his book (pp. 70ff.) an example that has the same feature that the two scopings converge in their truth-conditions, but he then provides indirect evidence that both scopings exist:

(5) In our class that consist of 40 students, at least one girl is taller than every boy.

So, one could rescue (1) from irrelevance by using Fox’s kind of evidence to fix the scope of the universal quantifier to below PAST tense and then observe that now still picks up the speech time. But that’s probably too much bother. In any case, as Tim mentioned to me, it is very interesting that we can have strong intuitions of scope ambiguity even with sentences where the two scopings are equivalent.

It is not very hard to fix (1) to make examples that do make the point for double-indexing:

(6) Once everyone now in this room was wearing a hat. (7) Once nobody now alive had been born yet.

(6) clearly has a reading where it claims simultaneous hat-wearing at some point in the past, which is truth-conditionally distinct from the weaker claim that for everyone there is a (potentially different) time in the past at which they wore a hat.

(7) has a sensible reading where it makes the same claim as (1), but here the wide-scope reading for nobody now alive would make the absurd claim that for none of us who are now alive is there a time in the past at which we had already been born.

So, (6) and (7) can be used for the argument without the worries that (1) and (3) raise.

Note finally that the example we used to argue for double world-indexing is also immune from this worry:

(8) It might very well have been that everyone actually here was somewhere else instead.

Here, the truth-conditions of the two scopings clearly diverge, depending on whether there is one possible world where everyone is somewhere else.

I made (8) up this morning. Examples like this were discussed by Crossley & Humberstone (1977) but I don’t have a copy of that here. Max Cresswell (1990) uses:

(9) It might have been that everyone actually rich was poor.

which works just as well as my (8).

REFERENCES

  • M.J. Cresswell: 1990. Entities and Indices. Kluwer.
  • J.N. Crossley and L. Humberstone: 1977. “The Logic of Actually”. Reports on Mathematical Logic, 8, 11–29.
  • J.F.A.K. van Benthem: 1977. “Tense Logic and Standard Logic”. Logique et Analyse, 80, 395-437.
  • Danny Fox: 2000. Economy and Semantic Interpretation. MIT Press.
  • Hans Kamp: “Formal Properties of Now”. Theoria, 37, 227-273.
  • Frank Vlach: 1973. Now and Then: A Formal Study in the Logic of Tense Anaphora. PhD Dissertation. UCLA.

07.20.05 @ 03:24 PM

Stalnaker Reading

The best preparation for Wednesday’s first class on indexicality is Stalnaker’s paper “Pragmatics”, which is available in a scanned electronic form behind the password.

07.18.05 @ 01:38 PM

Lecture 7: Triggers and Accommodation

Today’s slides and a handout of the same material are now available online.

07.18.05 @ 01:35 PM

Prag Beer Now Fridays at 4pm

Starting this week, Prag Beer will be held Friday afternoons instead of Tuesday afternoons. Our meeting place will still be the R&D Pub, located on the fourth floor of the Stata Center. Contrary to what we said in class, we will congregate at 4pm (NOT 4:30), and will end whenever the pragmatics gods wish us to end.

Summary:

When: Every Friday, 4pm-??
Where: R&D Pub, 4th Floor, Stata Center

Hoping to see you there.

Kai and Raj

07.18.05 @ 01:34 PM

Answer to Homework #2

A. The presupposition of (3) is that someone broke the typewriter. That of (4) is that for some salient person x, x is going to Sweden (assuming “Thony” is focussed). Note that the presupposition of the latter sentence cannot be simply that someone other than Thony is going to Sweden (recall Kai’s discussion of Kripke’s famous example of dinner in N.Y.). To convince yourself that these are indeed the right presuppositions, examine their projection behaviour in embedded contexts, eg., Was it Anju who broke the typewriter? If it was Anju who broke the typewriter, I will be very upset.

B. They seem virtually impossible to accommodate, no matter how good the context may be. For example, imagine a future time when M.I.T.’s linguistics department has two students and two faculty members. Now imagine that you are visiting the Institute, and imagine further that it is common ground that, despite our small number of active participants, we are very lively, and every day, at least one of us gives a talk. Imagine further that Lucia is another visitor, and it is common ground that this is so. Now imagine me saying to you (out of the blue): “Lucia gave a talk today too.” Sounds very strange – what do you mean “too?” This strangeness persists despite the fact that it is common ground that at least one of me or my three colleagues gave a talk today.

Surprisingly enough, the above presuppositions are easily accommodated in fictional contexts. Imagine you pick up a new book tomorrow, and the first couple of lines read as follows:

  1. The man with the black hat returned to the café. The gazed look in his eye suggested trouble. I was trapped inside, and he was headed my way.
  2. I wanted to go to Sweden too, but my many nights at the casino and at the shady bar in Central Square prevented me from being able to do so.
  3. It was one of the grand lawyers of Lahore who suggested that I should go to the Hira Mandi, the Diamond Market, the area of the singing and dancing girls, the prostitutes’ area. (This sentence is actually taken from a work of non-fiction. It can be found on p.281 of V.S. Naipaul’s “Beyond Belief”, 1999, a great work of travel- writing published by Abacus (London). It is the first line of a new section in the book – the required presupposition has not at all been mentioned in the prior text)

C. Let us start by examining the difference between the presupposition of the “too” sentence and that of the “my daughter” sentence. We have seen that it is pretty easy to accommodate the “my daughter” presupposition, based on our beliefs about people of Kai’s age, how much we trust Kai, whether or not Kai’s having a daughter is at issue, etc. However, with “too”, there is a specific requirement that for some particular salient x, x is going to Sweden. In a context where there is no such salient proposition, the hearer has nothing to work with – whereas in the “my sister” case the presupposition is clear (whether or not it is satisfied by the common ground is a separate question), in the “too” case the sentence’s presupposition must be filled in by salient features of the context. In the absence of this contextual specification, the hearer is not even in a position to decide whether or not to accommodate, since the prior question of what she is to accommodate remains unresolved. Thus, we might suggest that those presuppositions that require contextual specification of some salient person or property or proposition (as with the definite article, pronouns, demonstratives, too, etc) just can’t be accommodated unless the context fills them in. This is in opposition to the “my daughter” example, which doesn’t require any particular context to furnish any particular salient features in order for the presupposition to be determined.

Unfortunately, it is not at all obvious how this account could be extended to constructions like it-clefts, which have a very definite presupposition (namely, that someone broke the typewriter) that doesn’t seem to require any contextual specification, yet remains strongly resistant to accommodation.

We will expand on these issues in class.

07.18.05 @ 01:33 PM

Lecture 6: Three Pictures of Presuppositions in Semantics

Today’s slides and a handout of the same material, and an audio file of the lecture are now available online.

07.13.05 @ 09:42 AM

Syllabus Change

We have changed the syllabus. The advanced topic for this coming Monday July 18 is now “Taxonomy of Triggers”.

Note that David Beaver may possibly make some remarks on the same topic in his class tomorrow.

07.13.05 @ 09:36 AM

References on Accommodation

To read more about accommodation, you could start with the paper by Lewis on “scorekeeping” which is on the syllabus. Additional readings:

07.13.05 @ 09:26 AM

Homework #2

Below, please find Homework #2. This is an optional assignment, and is not required for class credit. The exercise touches on issues we will raise next Monday, so (if you decide to do it) please send your answers to singhr@mit.edu by Sunday, 17 July. Our answer will be posted on the website the following Monday.

Again, feel free to come to either one of us with questions in the meantime.

We will see cases where an assertion A that requires the common ground to be a certain way can be felicitously uttered even when the common ground does not satisfy A’s presuppositional requirements. For example, imagine Kai rushes into class ten minutes late on Wednesday, and utters:

(1) Kai: I’m sorry I’m late. I had to take my daughter to the day care centre.

Kai’s assertion has a presupposition, viz., that Kai has a daughter. Not many of you know or believe (or even have an opinion about) this proposition. Hence, it cannot be common ground, and surely Kai is aware of that.

Nonetheless, few of us have difficulty with it. We “accommodate” the proposition fine enough, that is, we adjust our beliefs to include the proposition that Kai has a daughter, without complaint.

There are at least two factors that could be expected to influence how easy it is to accommodate a proposition presupposed by a speaker’s utterance. (i) The ease of accommodation might depend on how much trust the hearers have in the speaker’s information state about the relevant issue. (ii) The ease of accommodation might also depend on how well the proposition fits into the hearers’ belief systems.

Compare in this light (1) with the following:

(2) Kai: I’m sorry I’m late. I had to take my llama to the vet.

Now, consider a couple more sentences:

(3) Kai: I just found out that it was Anju who broke the typewriter.

(4) Kai: Guess what. Thony is going to Sweden, too.

Exercise:

  1. What are the presuppositions of (3) and (4)?
  2. Imagine these sentences being uttered in contexts where the presuppositions are NOT satisfied. How easy is it to accommodate the presuppositions of (3) and (4) in such contexts?
  3. Can you propose an explanation for the difference in ease of accommodation, if any, between (1) on the one hand and (3)/(4) on the other hand?

07.11.05 @ 09:36 AM

Lecture 5: Stalnaker's Project

Today’s slides and a handout of the same material, and an audio file of the lecture are now available online.

07.11.05 @ 09:32 AM

Some References Mentioned in Class

If you’d like to read a survey article or two on presupposition, here are the two best ones (one more philosophical, the other more technical):

  • Scott Soames: 1989. “Presupposition” in: D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (eds.) Handbook of Philosophical Logic: Volume IV: Topics in the Philosophy of Language. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 553-616.
  • David Ian Beaver: 1997. “Presupposition” in Johan van Benthem and Alice ter Meulen (eds.) Handbook of Logic and Language. Amsterdam: Elsevier. pp. 939-1008. Preprint: http://montague.stanford.edu/~dib/Publications/handbook.ps.

If you want to study the notion of common ground, here are three references to look at (and you can then follow the references mentioned in these works):

  • Herbert H. Clark: 1996. Using Language. Cambridge University Press.
  • Ronald Fagin, Joseph Y. Halpern, Yoram Moses, Moshe Y. Vardi: 1995. Reasoning about Knowledge. MIT Press.
  • Robert Stalnaker: 2002. “Common Ground”. Linguistics and Philosophy 25(5-6), December 2002, 701-721. doi:10.1023/A:1020867916902

07.08.05 @ 02:17 PM

Lecture 4: Presupposition

Today’s slides and a handout of the same material are now available online.

07.08.05 @ 12:13 AM

Notes on Presupposition

A set of lecture notes on presupposition (from 10/02/2003) can be downloaded. The next three lectures will deal with material touched on in these notes.

07.07.05 @ 05:17 PM

Answer to Homework #1

[This is my answer to Homework #1. If you have any questions or ideas arising out of this exercise, please don’t hesitate to bring them to me and/or Raj via email or in person. — Kai.]

Gamut actually comment on this issue briefly (on p. 208). They discuss the sentence “A or B” (with the understanding that “or” is inclusive disjunction) and the competing stronger statement “A” (of which “A or B” is a logical consequence). If “A or B” was correctly used, then S believes that L does not believe that “A or B” is true. Now, they say that it follows that S believes that L does not believe that “A” is true (and thus that (ii) can’t be the reason why “A” wasn’t uttered instead of “A or B”). The reason is this: ‘if L were to believe that “A” is true, then L would also believe that “A or B” is true, since this is a simple logical consequence of “A”.’

In general, one might argue that it can’t be that L believes a strong statement “B” and at the same time does not believe a weaker statement “A” which is entailed by “B”, since L will of course draw the inference from “B” to “A”. And thus, it shouldn’t be possible that the reason S chooses to assert the weaker “A” is that S believes that L already believes the stronger “B” (which logically entails “A”).

But one could object to this line of reasoning: it isn’t always so that a person believes all the logical consequences of one of their beliefs, especially if the logic leading to the entailed proposition is circuitous. This may be why Gamut point to the fact that “A or B” is a simple logical consequence of “A”.

So, unless we operate with the idealization that L is a perfectly logical believer, there might be circumstances where one should choose to assert a weaker statement “A” because one thinks that while L already believes the stronger and relevant statement “B”, L hasn’t drawn the inference to “A”.

Q: Can anyone construct a natural scenario that would support this prediction?

Conclusion: the Claim as stated in the Homework is not quite right.

Nevertheless, for the kinds of scalar implicatures that we have been discussing, the claim is probably right, since they all involve simple logical consequences.

—

There are some other things one might say about Condition (ii). In particular, there seem to be natural speech acts where we assert “A” while not being convinced that L doesn’t already believe it, or even while being convinced that L does already believe it. Reminders are a case in point where one asserts something that L already believes. Another kind of case is where one asserts “A” to let L know than one has noticed “A”: “You got a new haircut!”.

We could fiddle with Gamut’s definition. Perhaps, one could replace (ii) with “S believes that it is not already common ground between S and L that A is true”, using the notion of “common ground” which we will discuss soon in the unit on presupposition.

Another possibility is to say that the speech acts I just mentioned are not assertions in the strict sense and thus should not be covered by Gamut’s definition. [But don’t scalar implicatures arise in those kinds of speech acts as well?] It is interesting to note that such non-standard assertions are sometimes marked with special speech act markers. The haircut example, for example, would naturally be marked with “ja” in German. One crude approximation to the meaning of “ja” is that it marks propositions that for all the speaker knows are already known to the hearer.

07.07.05 @ 02:42 PM

Stalnaker Reading

The best preparation for Friday’s first class on presupposition is Stalnaker’s paper “Pragmatic Presuppositions”, which is available in a scanned electronic form behind the password.

07.06.05 @ 09:35 AM

Embedded Implicature

The handout with examples of embedded implicature is downloadable.

07.06.05 @ 09:34 AM

Lecture 3: Embedded Implicatures

Today’s slides, a handout of the same material, and an audio file of the lecture are now available online.

07.06.05 @ 09:32 AM

Prag Beer and Office Hours Changes

In an effort to encourage discussion and interaction, as well as to get to know you all a little better, we are proposing the following changes to our currently scheduled office hours. Raj will hold office hours Monday 3:00-4:30 and Kai will maintain his Wednesday 12:30-2:00 office hour. However, we will convert Kai’s Monday office hour into a Tuesday afternoon “prag beer.”

Prag Beer is modelled after Alec Marantz’ highly popular Morph Beer. The plan is to meet every Tuesday, 4:45pm in the R&D Pub on the 4th floor of the Stata Center. We imagine this as being a chance to meet in an informal setting to discuss all kinds of issues from formal technicalities of the Gamut system to why we should study pragmatics at all, as well as anything else you would like to talk about. The first prag beer will be held this Tuesday, July 5.

We very much hope that you can make it, and look forward to getting to know you all a little better.

Summary of Office Hours:

Kai: Wednesdays 12:30-2:00, 32-D884
Raj: Mondays 3:00-4:30, 32-D774
Prag Beer: Tuesdays 4:45-??, R&D Pub, 4th Floor, Stata Center

Please note that due to the July 4th holiday, Raj will not have office hours on that day. Please feel free to set up appointments with him any other time next week. And you are encouraged to get in touch with the both of us to set up ad hoc appointments outside of the stated office hours throughout the duration of the LSA.

07.01.05 @ 01:32 PM

Homework #1

Here is Gamut’s definition of the correct use of a statement again:

A speaker S makes correct use of a sentence A in order to make a statement before a listener L just in case:
(i) S believes that A is true;
(ii) S believes that L does not believe that A is true;
(iii) S believes that A is relevant to the subject of the conversation;
(iv) For all sentences B of which A is a logical consequence (and which are not equivalent to A), (i) - (iii) do not all hold with respect to B.

Claim:

For any given B of which A is a logical consequence, condition (ii) cannot be the reason why the speaker did not utter B.

Task:

Discuss.

I will post my own answer to this homework some time next week. You should then compare your solution to what I say and alert me to any issues you want to discuss.

06.29.05 @ 01:49 PM

Room Change

Starting with Wednesday’s class, we will meet in Room 32-123, which is across the hall from 32-124. The room has a capacity of 318, so it’s a bit of spatial overkill, but we should be more comfortable there.

06.29.05 @ 12:57 PM

Lecture 2: Quantity Implicatures

Today’s slides and a handout of the same material are now available online. [No audio because of a malfunction.]

06.29.05 @ 12:47 PM

Lecture 1: Semantics and Pragmatics

Today’s slides, a handout of the same material, and an audio file of the lecture are now available online.

06.27.05 @ 12:33 PM

Gamut Reading

The most appropriate reading in preparation for Wednesday’s class is

Gamut, L. T. F. (1991). Logic, Language, and Meaning. Chicago University Press. vol. 1, ch. 6 “Pragmatics: Meaning and Usage”, sections 6.1 to 6.8, pp. 195 — 212.

A scanned copy is available online.

06.27.05 @ 12:20 PM

Course Readings

The readings for this course are all available electronically: freely on the web, or through the publisher when connected from MIT, or in a password-protected area of this website. You will need the login information from page 3 of the syllabus handed out in class.

06.27.05 @ 12:17 PM

E-Mail List

After today’s class, please sign yourself up for the E-Mail list at the link handed out in class (page 1 of the in-class syllabus).

06.27.05 @ 12:15 PM

Syllabus

The course syllabus is now available. It incorporates a reading list.

06.17.05 @ 11:15 AM