Semantics etc.

Chris Manning on his resource page has this to say about semantics etc.: “Not quite as exciting as when it first appeared. No job gossip.”.

Ah well, yes, without a doubt, this site has lost some drive over the last couple of years. So, it’s time to do something about that.

Posting to semantics etc will cease as of now, although the site will still be available for a while. I will blog about various things, including on semantics etc-type topics at my consolidated web site http://kaivonfintel.org.

If you subscribe to the RSS feed for semantics etc, the transition will be seamless and you won’t need to do anything. You’ll continue to get fed any posts on kvf.org that have to do with semantics.

See you over there.

For my introductory remark at the Workshop on the 30th Anniversary of Stalnaker’s “Assertion”, I wanted to trace the impact of the paper by following citations to it. This turned out to be surprisingly difficult:

Other indexing services gave the same result:

One might ask why the indexing services missed such a seminal paper. Granted it appeared not in one of the foremost journals of the field, but as a chapter in a book series. On the other hand, the series (Syntax & Semantics from the Academic Press) is/was widely read and was the venue for quite a few important papers (including David Kaplan’s “Dthat” in the very same 1978 volume).

But whatever the answer, this observation shows clearly that when one wants to measure impact of a work (or the standing of a scholar in the field), one should not rely exclusively on these indexing services. We all know that “Assertion” was one of the most important papers in the history of the field (for example, it is on Frank Veltman’s list of classics in semantics & pragmatics), but ISI’s Web of Science is clueless.

One service that actually delivered something useful was Google Scholar:

At least for our small field, I think the overall lesson is that to find out about the status of a paper or and author, one shouldn’t ask the indexing services, but just ask the experts.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the publication of Bob Stalnaker’s “Assertion”, MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy will be hosting a conference on December 12-13, 2008. The aim is to showcase some recent work that builds on the picture of context and communication originally developed in “Assertion”, and to have linguists and philosophers discuss recent developments and implementations of that framework.

All are welcome.

On Saturday, December 6th, 2008, Angelika Kratzer’s PhD students (current and former) will gather at MIT for a workshop in her honor. Anybody is welcome to attend the workshop sessions.

How ignoring existential import can take you to the land of dinosaurs:

For a long time, I have imagined that when I’m retired (of course, at the moment, who actually believes anymore that they can retire at all), I would spend a lot of pleasurable time examining medieval manuscripts in all kinds of European libraries and monasteries and write a full history of the square of opposition. Now, it seems that the modern age has made that vision a bit moot. The New York Times today reports about the digitization of the abbey library at St Gallen, Switzerland. A quick check of what’s already online shows some manuscripts about logic and semantics. Here’s a square of opposition from a manuscript containing a copy of Apuleius’ Peri Hermeneias:

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

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!]

[I know that this blog is being frustratingly silent these days. I'll have to figure out what to do about that, but I'm too busy even for that. In the mean time, I'll try to post a few snippets.]

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.

Today is a big day for semantics, for open access, open science publishing in our field: the first research article in our new journal Semantics and Pragmatics (S&P) has been published!

Barker, Chris & Chung-chieh Shan. 2008. Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding. Semantics and Pragmatics 1(1): 1–42. doi:10.3765/sp.1.1.

We will comment on this occasion further on the editors’ blog. But take a look at the pdf and enjoy the extensive hyper-features: active links from the text to the bibliography, clickable DOIs in the bibliography for most of the cited literature, links from example numbers in the text to the examples, etc. Also, note that the bibliography style follows the guidelines agreed to by a working group of linguistics journal editors. In particular, note that our bibliography style gives full first names (looking at you, Springer!).

Of course, we welcome any comments and feedback. Just send us email at editors@semprag.org or comment here or on the editors’ blog.

And, given that all of us are using the summer to write new papers, please submit your best work to S&P. We’re ready to give you the best publishing experience you have ever had.

Update: See now also David’s post on “Donkeys in Cyberspace” on Language Log, which has a growing comment thread where we learn that the problem of donkey anaphora is not an obvious problem.

In a short review of the sequel to “The Graduate”, we find this in today’s Boston Globe:

Forty years have passed since Benjamin Braddock and Elaine Robinson were last seen breathless on the back seat of a bus, staring at a future that suddenly seemed as dense and inscrutable as a new planet. The indelible scene, of course, is from the movie “The Graduate,” which consigned Charles Webb, on whose novel it was based, to the bizarre fate of being the unknown author of his most famous work.

“the unknown author of his most famous work” — Discuss.

If you’re one of us conditionals buffs, you know the famous footnote from Frank Ramsey’s article “General Propositions and Causality”:

If two people are arguing “If p will q?” and are both in doubt as to p, they are adding p hypothetically to their stock of knowledge and arguing on that basis about q; so that in a sense “If p, q” and “If p, not q” are contradictories. We can say that they are fixing their degrees of belief in q, given p. If p turns out false, these degrees of belief are rendered void. If either party believes not p for certain, the question ceases to mean anything to him except as a question about what follows from certain laws or hypothesis.

The first sentence of that footnote is now known as the Ramsey Test for the acceptability conditions of conditionals. The paper was written in 1929 and appeared posthumously (Ramsey died in 1930 at the age of 26) in 1931 in the collection The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays.

The Cambridge University DSpace archive contains a selection of Ramsey’s manuscripts and among them is the manuscript for “General Propositions and Causality”. The original of the Ramsey Test is on p.17 of the manuscript, which I reproduce here (click on the picture to download a full resolution pdf of the page):

How cool is that? For more on Ramsey, see D.H. Mellor’s biography article and the radio portrait that it was derived from, also in the Cambridge DSpace archive.

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!.

The big day is here. The new journal, Semantics and Pragmatics (S&P), which I’m editing with David Beaver, is now open for submissions. The journal’s website is live (although there may be a few remaining glitches). We have a “pilot issue” with a couple of editorial articles. We expect the first research articles to appear in early 2008.

Of course, we’re asking everyone in the field to spread the word about the new journal and to encourage submission of new work to S&P.

We’re excited and looking forward to the flood of submissions … (please consider submitting your latest and greatest work to S&P yourselves!)

In our article on universals in semantics, Lisa Matthewson and I discuss the question of what, if any, universally present lexical items there are. We cite an article by Cliff Goddard (2001. “Lexico-Semantic Universals: A Critical Overview”. Linguistic Typology, 5(1): 1–65), who reviewed the state of the art on that question. He argues that Japanese does not have a word for “water” per se:

Surprising as it may seem to English speakers, “water” is probably not a universal lexical unit. Japanese has two words (mizu and yu) for “water”, with yu (often with an honorific prefix o–) being reserved for hot water (Suzuki 1978: 51–52). Mizu cannot be used about hot water. Furthermore, combining the adjective atsui “hot” with mizu sounds unnatural — Suzuki calls it “self-contradictory” — though there is no such restriction in relation to other liquids, e.g., atsui miruku “hot milk” (cf. Wierzbicka 1996: 229). These facts imply that mizu and yu both have a reference to temperature built into their meanings.

In our draft, we expressed some skepticism:

We have our suspicions that there is a possible pragmatic explanation in which yu means “hot water” while mizu means just “water” but because of the available option of yu implicates “cold water”. We can’t pursue this here.

This was, of course, armchair science of the worst kind. But that’s why science is a collective and collaborative enterprise. Eric McCready quickly wrote from Tokyo to refute our suggestion. After some back and forth and some fieldwork that he conducted, he has come around:

After asking judgments from a number of people with various examples, it seems that you guys were right after all. Here’s a simple variation on your running water example; this is extremely natural.

The example is this:

Koko mizu  deru?

here water come.out

Un,  oyu       dake dakedo ne

yeah hot.water only though PT

“Can you get water out of here (e.g. faucet)? Yeah, but only hot water.”

So, it seems that our armchair guess was right: Japanese does have a word for water: mizu, but in most contexts it implicates coldness because of the availability of the equally natural yu “hot water”. One needs to control for implicature if one wants to test for the lexical content of a morpheme/word.

As a proud “Doktorvater”, I would like to announce that Tamina Stephenson’s PhD thesis Towards a Theory of Subjective Meaning is now completed and available at the Semantics Archive.

This weblog will be undergoing some changes in the next few weeks:

• it will be moving towards being a group blog on semantics etc. rather than Kai’s personal site
• Kai’s home page has moved to http://kaivonfintel.org
• the geek notes part is now a stand-alone blog called “The Academic Geek” for those who are interested in that kind of thing

Thony Gillies and I have finally finished the overdue draft of our indeterminacy proposal about the semantics and pragmatics of the epistemic modal might: “Might Made Right”. Check it out and please give us feedback. We’re told the very final version is needed towards the end of the fall.

There is a special issue of The Linguistic Review in the works, with a set of invited papers on the topic of universals from the perspective of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Lisa Matthewson and I just finished the manuscript of the semantics article:

• Kai von Fintel & Lisa Matthewson. 2007. “Universals in Semantics”. ms, to appear in a special issue of The Linguistic Review devoted to universals.

We found that there hadn’t been a survey of universals in semantics in a formal/theoretical vein and so we decided to fill the gap, at least temporarily until some burning soul takes on the task. The manuscript is 64 pages long, including 16 pages of bibliography.

The article is now going off to be reviewed, but we would like to enlist the help of semanticists everywhere to take a look at the manuscript and help us. So, let us know if there are any errors, if we forgot to mention something (although at this point and this length, we’ll probably only be able to add a footnote here and there), or anything else you would like us to think about. Cheers!

“Anatomy of a Modal Construction”, an article I wrote with Sabine Iatridou has now appeared in Linguistic Inquiry. The future-proof link is doi:10.1162/ling.2007.38.3.445. Thanks to the MIT Copyright Amendment Form, I can post the final version of the article here.