Conditionals: Philosophical and Linguistic Issues
July 20-31, Budapest, Hungary

Course Directors:

• Barry Loewer, Rutgers, Philosophy Department, USA;
• Jason Stanley, Rutgers, Philosophy Department, USA

Faculty:

• Dorothy Edgington, University of Oxford, Faculty of Philosophy, Magdalen College and University of London, Birbeck College, UK;
• Alan Hajek, Australian National University, Research School of Social Sciences, Philosophy Program;
• Angelika Kratzer, University of Massachusetts, Department of Linguistics, USA;
• Robert Stalnaker, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, USA

Brief Course Description

The aims of this course are 1) to teach and discuss recent philosophical and linguistic advances on our understanding of conditionals and 2) to promote discussions among the faculty and participants of issues involving conditionals from the perspectives of linguistics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of science 3) to help establish a network of young researchers on issues in philosophy of language and philosophical logic.

The course will cover

1. an introduction to the main ideas needed for an understanding of recent work on conditionals including the basics of modal logic, probability theory, and linguistics
2. the main accounts of the linguistics and semantics of indicative and subjunctive conditionals;
3. the connections between probability and conditionals;
4. connections between conditionals and other philosophical concepts including laws, causation, knowledge, the direction of time.

Editor(s): Olivier Bonami & Patricia Cabredo Hofherr

Table of contents:

LOBKE AELBRECHT Dutch modal complement ellipsis 7

ANA ARREGUI Resolving similarity in embedded contexts 35

ELENA CASTROVIEJO MIRÓ Adverbs in restricted configurations 53

JINYOUNG CHOI & MARIBEL ROMERO Rescuing existential free choice items in episodic sentences 77

GUGLIELMO CINQUE Two types of non-restrictive relatives 99

DENIS CREISSELS Remarks on split intransitivity and fluid intransitivity 139

LAURENCE R. HORN “I love me some him”: The landscape of non-argument datives 169

GIANINA IORDACHIOAIA & ELENA SOARE Two kinds of event plurals: Evidence from Romanian nominalizations 193

JACQUES JAYEZ & LUCIA M. TOVENA Presque and almost: How argumentation derives from comparative meaning 217

JEAN-PIERRE KOENIG AND LIAN-CHENG CHIEF Scalarity and state-changes in Mandarin (and other languages) 241

SVETA KRASIKOVA Comparison in Chinese 263

YUSUKE KUBOTA Solving the morpho-syntactic puzzle of the Japanese -te form complex predicate: A Multi-Modal Combinatory Categorial Grammar analysis 283

GABRIELA MATOS & ANA BRITO Comparative clauses and cross linguistic variation: a syntactic approach 307

ULI SAUERLAND Pseudo-sloppy readings in flat binding 331

MARTIN SCHÄFER Resolving scope in manner modification 351

TATJANA SCHEFFLER Relevance conditionals as utterance modifying adverbials 373

SERGEI TATEVOSOV Subeventual structure and non-culmination 393

ROBERT VAN ROOIJ Comparatives and quantifiers 423

So, now I can do some of this work during my free (hah!) time rather than wait until I’m 74.

[Disclosure: I am member of Janneke's "manuscriptcommissie" and also, as she says in her acknowledgements, "by far the most cited author in this dissertation" -- so I am surely a bit biased.]

• Singh, Raj. 2008. On the interpretation of disjunction: Asymmetric, incremental, and eager for inconsistency. Linguistics and Philosophy. doi:10.1007/s10988-008-9038-x.

Abstract:

Hurford’s Constraint (Hurford, Foundations of Language, 11, 409–411, 1974) states that a disjunction is infelicitous if its disjuncts stand in an entailment relation: #John was born in Paris or in France. Gazdar (Pragmatics, Academic Press, NY, 1979) observed that scalar implicatures can obviate the constraint. For instance, sentences of the form (A or B) or (Both Aand B) are felicitous due to the exclusivity implicature of the first disjunct: A or B implicates ‘not (A and B)’. Chierchia, Fox, and Spector (Handbook of Semantics, 2008) use the obviation of Hurford’s Constraint in these cases to argue for a theory of local implicature. I present evidence indicating that the constraint needs to be modified in two ways. First, implicatures can obviate Hurford’s Constraint only in earlier disjuncts, not later ones: #(Both A and B) or (A or B). Second, the constraint rules out not only disjuncts that stand in an entailment relation, but also disjuncts that are even mutually consistent: #John is from Russia or Asia. I propose to make sense of these facts by providing an incremental evaluation procedure which checks that each new disjunct to the right is inconsistent with the information to its left, before the disjunct can be strengthened by local implicature.

Congratulations, Raj!

Bonus points are offered to any semantic relativist for a complete analysis of this example.

Aifric Campbell (who once lectured in semantics at the University of Gothenburg) has written a mystery novel inspired by the mysterious death of Richard Montague (warning: the website is a bit flashy, if you know what I mean). The book is currently only available as an import on Amazon: The Semantics of Murder by Aifric Campbell.

Here is a synopsis from the FantasticFiction website:

“Jay Hamilton lives a comfortable life in fashionable west London, listening to the minor and major dysfunctions of the over-privileged clients who frequent his psychoanalysis practice. But the darker recesses of his own psyche would not stand up to close examination: his brother Richard, a genius professor of mathematical linguistics, was apparently killed by rent boys in Los Angeles and Jay was the first on the scene.

Author Dana Flynn is determined to scratch beneath the surface while researching a biography she intends to write about Richard, and finds that Jay’s professional life is as precarious as his personal relationships - he uses his clients’ case studies as material for his fiction writing.

Such is Jay’s hunger for recognition as a creative force that he exploits the vulnerables he counsels, and a decision not to intervene when a troubled patient steals a baby, causes his past to unravel.”

[Thanks to Barbara Abbott via Larry Horn for the heads up!]

The 2007 “Lifetime Achievement Award” of the Association for Computational Linguistics went to Lauri Karttunen. There is a video of the award ceremony (the award was announced by ACL Chair Mark Steedman) and Lauri’s acceptance speech. The written version of the talk appeared in the December 2007 issue of Computational Linguistics:

Karttunen, Lauri. 2007. Word play. Computational Linguistics 33(4): 443–467. doi:10.1162/coli.2007.33.4.443.

Lauri has posted the pdf of the article on his website. It’s a delightful read, somewhat along the lines of Barbara Partee’s reminiscences. Highly recommended.