Readings for next week
Next week’s readings:
Manfred Krifka. “Semantics below and above speech acts”. Handout, Stanford University, April 9, 2004.
Chris Potts. “Conventional implicatures, a distinguished class of meanings”. To appear in Gillian Ramchand and Charles Reiss, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Audio of Fifteenth Lecture (Presupposition)
… is now available.
Audio of Fourteenth Lecture (Presupposition)
… is now available.
Geurts paper
The paper by Bart Geurts on existential import that we’re discussing on Friday is at
http://www.ru.nl/filosofie/tfl/bart/papers/eximport.pdf
(different URL than the one listed on the syllabus)
Audio of Thirteenth Lecture (Presupposition)
… is now available.
Some optional readings on presupposition
I have put one copy each of Soames’ handbook article and of Lewis’ scorekeeping paper on my filing cabinet. You can borrow them for your own xeroxing but return promptly so that other people have access too.
You can also look at Beaver’s handbook article, which he has online at http://montague.stanford.edu/~dib/Publications/handbook.ps. His article with Henk Zeevat on accommodation (which is on the syllabus for later in the semester) is also available online at http://montague.stanford.edu/~dib/Publications/accommodation.pdf.
Notes on Presupposition
A set of notes on presupposition is available.
Audio of Twelfth Lecture (Presupposition)
… is now available.
Audio of Eleventh Lecture (Assessment-Relativity)
… is now available.
No class on Friday 10/22 because of NELS
By popular request, we will cancel this Friday’s class meeting so that there is no conflict with NELS. Instead, we will extend the semester by one day and have our last class meeting on Dec 10. The course calendar has been updated.
Audio of Tenth Lecture (Monsters)
… is now available.
Anand & Nevins relocated
I just found out that the paper on shifty operators by Anand & Nevins is not where it used to be, because Andrew’s web presence has moved to Harvard. The new location is: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/%7Enevins/shifty-operators.pdf. I have updated the syllabus.
Readings on Answering Machines
There is a short list of readings on the Answering Machine Paradox, in case you want to pursue this issue further.
Audio of Ninth Lecture (Referential Definites)
… is now available.
Notes on Referential Definites
The notes on referential definites are available. There are some exercises that will be the homework due 10/20.
Audio of Eighth Lecture (More Indexicality)
… is now available.
Homework (due 10/8)
Think about the answering machine “paradox” which concerns the outgoing message “I am not here right now”.
The system we have in place says that “I” with respect to c,i denotes the speaker of c (Sc), that “here” denotes the location of Sc at the time of the utterance (tc), that “now” denotes the time of the utterance (tc). Show that we straightforwardly predict that “I am not here now” cannot be uttered truthfully.
Given this system, what could be said to explain why the outgoing message is not in fact useless?
Or, would you argue that the system needs to be changed? If so, how?
Write up to two pages on this topic. Due next Friday 10/8 in class, email submission prior to class ok and even preferred.
Listeners/visitors are welcome to hand in their thoughts as well.
Audio of Seventh Lecture (Indexicality)
… is now available.
Kupffer on Occurrence Dependence
Here is the reference by Kupffer that I mentioned in class:
Manfred Kupffer. “Occurrence-Dependence”. Preprint Series of the Research Group “Logic in Philosophy”. University of Konstanz.
Abstract: Within a single sentence, sometimes different syntactic occurrences of the same expression refer differently. This is what I call “occurrence-dependence”. The paper compares two frameworks that are able to deal with occurrence-dependence, namely tokenreflexive semantics and occurrence-interpretation. It is argued that the key concept of the latter framework is reducible to the key concept of the first: while tokenreflexive semantics is concerned with the interpretation of utterances, occurrences should best be understood as certain sets of utterances.
Indexicality Notes
There are some lecture notes by Irene in HTML format (with some broken symbols) available at
For those of you who have not taken our 24.973 Advanced Semantics course, it may also be useful as a refresher to take a look at our lecture notes on intensional semantics. They are available at
Further Readings on Implicature
There is now a list of recent work on implicature. I have only listed the very recent stuff. You can unravel the topic from there.
Audio of Sixth Lecture
… is now available.
Audio of Fifth Lecture
… is now available.
Audio of Fourth Lecture
… is now available (18MB!). Note that because of loss of battery power the last couple of minutes are missing.
Audio of Third Lecture
… is now available (18MB!).
Audio of Second Lecture
… is now available (19+MB!).
Condition (ii) in Gamut's definition
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.
My 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:
Explain why. (Email your answer to me by Tuesday 5 pm.)
Grice Cheatsheet
For your refrigerator door: a handout with Grice’s Maxims.
Audio of First Lecture
This semester, I will make available MP3 files of the course lectures. The first lecture is now available. Note: this is a large file of almost 19MB. Also: the recorder was sometimes a bit far from where I was talking, so during these passages you might have to adjust the volume. I’ll try to figure out how to keep the recorder close to me next time.
The main purpose for recording the lectures is to help me with maintaining the lecture notes, but obviously these files could be of use for participants in the class as well.
Calendar
There is also a course calendar.
Syllabus
The official version of the course syllabus is now available.
Welcome
This is the course website for the Fall 2004 incarnation of course 24.954 Pragmatics in Linguistic Theory. The first class meeting is on Wednesday, September 8, 2004. See you then.
[Last year’s website has been archived, You can access it at http://semantics-online.org/pragmatics/2003/.]