Semantics etc.

As a proud doctor father, let me announce that Tamina Stephenson’s L&P article has appeared as an “online first” publication:

• Tamina Stephenson. 2008. “Judge Dependence, Epistemic Modals, and Predicates of Personal Taste”. Linguistics and Philosophy. doi:10.1007/s10988-008-9023-4.

Congratulations, Tamina!

PS. Tamina assures me that it is not her fault that Springer/L&P has me alphabetized in the wrong place in the bibliography. Here’s a grrrr! for Springer!

The University of Amsterdam has a Digital Academic Repository. One of the gems in it is a full searchable pdf-version (in two files) of Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof’s seminal 1984 dissertation, Studies on the semantics of questions and the pragmatics of answers.

Final Call for Papers

First Formal Epistemology Festival
Conditionals and Ranking Functions
Konstanz, July 28-30, 2008
Kindly funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung

This is the first of a series of small and thematically focused events in formal epistemology organized by Eric Swanson (Michigan), Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto), and Franz Huber (Konstanz).

The background for the first Formal Epistemology Festival is the 40th anniversary of Robert Stalnaker’s “A Theory of Conditionals” and the 20th anniversary of Wolfgang Spohn’s “Ordinal Conditional Functions. A Dynamic Theory of Epistemic States”.

Invited speakers include:

Alan Hájek (ANU)
Hannes Leitgeb (Bristol)
Hans Rott (Regensburg)
Wolfgang Spohn (Konstanz)
Robert Stalnaker (MIT)
Timothy Williamson (Oxford)

The festivities of 2009 will take place in Ann Arbor, featuring Causal Decision Theory and Scoring Rules (this happens to be the 10th anniversary of James Joyce’s The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory). The festivities of 2010 will take place in Toronto and focus on Defeater/Default Logic and Perception (this happens to be the 30th anniversary of Ray Reiter’s “A Logic for Default Reasoning” and the 15th anniversary of John Pollock’s Cognitive Carpentry). Further details about these events will be announced in due time.

We are now inviting submissions of papers of at least 5000 words on the topic of Conditionals and Ranking Functions. Please send a pdf prepared for blind refereeing to:

franz.huber@uni-konstanz.de

Deadline for submissions: February 29, 2008
Notification of Acceptance: April 30, 2008

Kent Bach. 2008. “Perspectives on Possibilities: Contextualism, Relativism, or What?” ms.

Abstract:

Epistemic possibilities are relative to bodies of information, or perspectives. To claim that something is epistemically possible is typically to claim that it is possible relative one’s own current perspective. We generally do this by using bare, unqualified epistemic possibility (EP) sentences, ones that don’t mention the relevant perspective. The fact that epistemic possibilities are relative to perspectives suggests that these bare EP sentences fall short of fully expressing propositions, contrary to what both Contextualists and Relativists implicitly assume. They reject Propositional Invariantism (it implausibly implies that any EP proposition is false whose core proposition is known by anyone to be false) and maintain that changes in perspective shift either these sentences’ propositional contents or their truth-values. Radical Invariantism, which I defend, denies that the semantic contents of bare EP sentences shift. It claims, however, that these contents lack truth-values. They are not full-fledged propositions but merely propositional radicals. Only explicitly relativized EP sentences manage to express propositions, and these are the only EP propositions there are. Nevertheless, bare EP sentences are perfectly capable of being used to assert EP propositions, because utterances of them implicitly allude to the relevant perspective. Various problem cases challenge Radical Invariantism to explain pragmatically which perspective is read into the utterance of a given bare EP sentence. It can handle them without resorting, as Contextualism and Relativism do, to semantic bells and whistles.

Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 18 will take place March 21-23, 2008 at UMass Amherst. The program is now public.

Sad news: Eloise Jelinek has passed away. See the obituaries at Language Log and the Arizona Daily Star.

I met Eloise in 1988 when she was part of the NSF project on cross-linguistic quantification with Emmon Bach, Angelika Kratzer, and Barbara Partee. She was a brilliant linguist and even more wonderful human being. She lived to the age of 83. She will be missed.

John Burgess has posted the manuscript of his forthcoming textbook on philosophical logic, including tense logic, modal logic, and an extensive chapter on conditional logic:

• John P. Burgess. 2008. Philosophical Logic. Unpublished book ms, forthcoming from Princeton University Press, Foundations of Twenty-First Century Philosophy Series, general editor Scott Soames. [also: problems]

Angelika Kratzer is preparing a book on modals and conditionals for Oxford University Press, bringing together her classic works on this topic and much more. A first chapter, an updated version of “What must and can must and can mean”, is available on the Semantics Archive.

This is the first chapter of a book manuscript. The book will bring together most of my previous work on the topic of modals and conditionals. The original work has been edited for style, cut or merged to avoid overlap, translated if necessary, and supplemented with additional material for purposes of clarification. In addition, there are a few new chapters connecting the older work to the current state of the art. I will post drafts of the chapters as they become available. Any comments are highly appreciated.

Mandy Simons has two new papers on her website:

• Presupposition and Cooperation (Under Review)

  “In this paper, I propose a novel view of presuppositions as those propositions which an interpreter must take the speaker to accept in order to take the speaker to be fully cooperative, in the Gricean sense.”

• A Gricean View on Intrusive Implicatures. To appear in Klaus Petrus (ed.), Meaning and Analysis: New Essays on H. Paul Grice.

  “This paper explores one of the long-standing objections to Grice’s account of conversational implicature: the case of purported implicatures which are apparently generated by subordinate clauses, or which fall under the scope of a logical operator (typically both). Such cases, for reasons to be detailed below, pose a challenge to Grice’s account. While those who have posed the challenge, ranging from advocates of truth conditional pragmatics to strict compositionalists, have a wide variety of views as to the correct account of the data, they are united in reaching the same negative conclusion: that Grice’s account cannot be extended to intrusive implicatures.
  
  In this paper, I will argue for a different conclusion. I will suggest that there is a natural modification of Grice’s model which allows for the generation of implicatures from non-asserted sentence-parts. The goal of the paper is to articulate this modification and apply it to some sample cases. This is done in part 2 of the paper. In part 1, I introduce the cases to be investigated and explain in a little more detail what issues they raise.”

[I was asked to post this call for papers for a workshop at Harvard early next year.]

The Workshop on Markedness and Underspecification in the Morphology and Semantics of Agreement (MUMSA) will bring together researchers from two disciplinary areas of Linguistics (Morphology and Semantics) and from typological and formalist backgrounds, who are united by both their object of study (the categorizations underlying agreement) and their approach (appeal to competition via underspecification), but who in practice have little opportunity for cross-pollination. The workshop will make steps towards filling the voids among these exciting research domains.

Location: Harvard University

Date: February 29 — March 2, 2008

Organizers: Jonathan Bobaljik (Univ. Connecticut), Andrew Nevins (Harvard Univ.), Uli Sauerland (ZAS, Berlin)

Significant advances have been made in the understanding of both the morphology and semantics of agreement in recent years. For example, the last five years have seen, on the one hand, the publication of new treatments of the range of variation in the morphological expression of person marking (esp. work by M. Cysouw), and on the other, some of the first new discoveries about the formal semantics of personal pronouns and person agreement (especially work by Heim, Kratzer, Sauerland and others). Yet the results of the two disciplinary areas have been largely isolated from one another, in part as a result of the increasing degree of sub-specialization within the field. MUMSA will provide for a balance of speakers representing morphology and semantics, typology and formal theory. Roughly two-thirds of the speakers are invited participants, selected from the cutting edge in each area. The workshop will have a presentation + invited commentary format to ensure the highest level of integration among the invited participants. Additional talks will be selected by refereed abstract.

Topics for investigation include but are not limited to: * markedness (in form versus in meaning) * person (evidence for or against categories such as “participant” and “3/other”) * number (morphologically, there is near consensus in treating singular as unmarked with respect to plural, yet in the semantic literature, there is growing evidence for the opposite relationship, see Sauerland et. al. 2005) * gender (the legacy of Jakobson’s view of the feminine:masculine contrast) * entailment relations among features (morphological and semantic evidence) and the related question of a feature geometry * hierarchies (person, number, the question of a markedness reversal 2>1 in Algonquian agreement systems)

Invited Speakers: Susana Bejar (Univ. Toronto) Andrea Calabrese (Univ. Connecticut) Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard Univ.) Greville Corbett (Univ. Surrey) Michael Cysouw (Max Planck, Leipzig) Daniel Harbour (Queen Mary’s. London) Angelika Kratzer (UMass Amherst) Orin Percus (Univ. Nantes) Louisa Sadler (Univ. Essex) Kenneth J. Safir (Rutgers Univ.)

Abstracts should be sent as anonymous and as two-page PDFs in an email attachment to mumsa.abstracts@gmail.com by November 15th.

This is really good news:

Improved Article PDF Files

A new PDF format for downloading and printing articles has replaced the previous High Quality PDF format. This new format enables JSTOR users to “search” or “find” words and phrases within the PDF version of JSTOR articles, as well as copy and paste portions of text from them. In addition to these benefits, the new format facilitates the use of screen-reading software, such as JAWS for Windows. Moreover, PDF files in this new format are, on average, smaller in size than our current High Quality PDF files, which means that they can be downloaded more quickly and easily. We encourage you to try the new High Quality PDF files, especially if you have had printing or downloading difficulties in the past.

If — like me — you use JSTOR to download older articles, it’s fantastic news that the pdfs are now fully searchable (I had started to OCR the more important articles so that I could search them with Spotlight etc.).

The program of this year’s SALT conference is online now. The UConn organizers are urging everyone who plans to attend the conference, to preregister as soon as possible to make it easier to plan for the conference. I’ll be there Friday and part of Saturday at least. Hope to see you then.

Andrew Ira Nevins, David Pesetsky, Cilene Rodrigues: “Piraha Exceptionality: a Reassessment”. ms, March 2007.

Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Pirahã is exceptional in displaying “inexplicable gaps”, that these gaps follow from an alleged cultural principle restricting communication to “immediate experience”, and that this principle has “severe” consequences for work on Universal Grammar. We argue against each of these claims. Relying on the available documentation and descriptions of the language (especially the rich material in Everett (1986; 1987b)), we argue that many of the exceptional grammatical “gaps” supposedly characteristic of Pirahã are misanalyzed by Everett (2005) and are neither gaps nor exceptional among the world’s languages. We find no evidence, for example, that Pirahã lacks embedded clauses, and in fact find strong syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of their existence in Pirahã. Likewise, we find no evidence that Pirahã lacks quantifiers, as claimed by Everett (2005). Furthermore, most of the actual properties of the Pirahã constructions discussed by Everett (for example, the ban on prenominal possessor recursion and the behavior of wh-constructions) are familiar from languages whose speakers lack the cultural restrictions attributed to the Pirahã. Finally, following mostly Gonçalves (1993; 2000; 2001), we also question some of the empirical claims about Pirahã culture advanced by Everett in primary support of the “immediate experience” restriction. We are left with no evidence of a causal relation between culture and grammatical structure. Pirahã grammar contributes to ongoing research into the nature of Universal Grammar, but presents no unusual challenge, much less a “severe” one.

I’ll be lounging on the beach at the time but this sounds like it will be fun:

The Square of Opposition — International Congress
Montreux, Switzerland, June 1–3, 2007

This will be the first international congress dedicated entirely to the square of opposition, considered in its various aspects.

There will be talks by the best specialists of the square and this will be also an interdisciplinary event gathering people from various fields: logic, philosophy, mathematics, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, semiotics. Visual and artistic representations of the square will also be presented.

Invited speakers include Pascal Engel, Laurence Horn, Saul Kripke, Terence Parsons, Pieter Seuren, Jan Wolenski.

The extended deadline for submission of contributed papers is March 1st 2007. Any contribution related to the square is welcome.

For further information, visit the website.

Last month, there was a conference in honor of Saul Kripke at CUNY. The conference page now has a full-length video of Kripke’s talk “The First Person”, a 178MB (!) file, and an incomplete video of the discussion section (which ends abruptly when Soames is questioning Kripke). The videos are in wmv format, which you need either the Windows Media Player to view, or, if — like me — you prefer open source software, the newest version of VLC will play wmv files as well. The audio on the videos isn’t all that great, so it takes some concentration to really follow what’s going on.

Sabine Iatridou has a new paper available online:

Iatridou, Sabine. 2007. “A Free Choice Item Hidden in Verbal Morphology”, to appear in Glossologia.

Abstract: This paper is couched within the hypothesis that verbal morphology can provide a determiner on the event description. It explores a particular construction in Greek and argues that it contains a free choice indefinite description. In the course of the investigation, the following topics are addressed as well: existential constructions, interval semantics, the meaning of Universal Perfect, temporal modifiers, raising.

What more could one want: free choice, existentials, intervals, the perfect, … perfect! The paper has an extensive discussion of the coolest sentence with any in it that I know (Irene Heim came up with it while Sabine was discussing this project with her):

We are five miles (away) from any gas station.

As discussed previously, I have a pitiable Erdös number of 7 and a Bacon number of infinity. In comparison, here’s Geoff Nunberg’s coup:

I belong to the select group of people who can boast of having an Erdös-Bacon number — specifically, 8. Thanks to my co-authorship of papers with Ivan Sag, who wrote a paper with Mark Liberman, who wrote a paper with Joseph Kruskal, who wrote a paper with Alan Hoffman, who wrote a paper with Paul Erdös, I have an Erdös number of 5. Thanks to my appearance in the documentary F*ck, to be released in August, 2006, I have a Bacon number of 3 by various routes, the most gratifying of them:

Geoffrey Nunberg appears in F*ck with Pat Boone, who was in The Cross and the Switchblade (1970) with Erik Estrada, who was in We Married Margo (2000) with Kevin Bacon.

Angelika Kratzer & Elisabeth Selkirk. 2007. “Phase theory and prosodic spellout: the case of verbs”. ms, to appear in The Linguistic Review.

In this paper we explore the consequences of adopting recent proposals by Chomsky 2000, 2001, 2005a, 2005b, according to which the syntactic derivation proceeds in terms of phases. The notion of phase–through the associated notion of spellout–allows for an insightful theory of the fact that syntactic constituents receive default phrase stress not across the board, but as a function of yet-to-be-explicated conditions on their syntactic context. We will see that the phonological evidence requires us to modify somewhat the theory of which functional categories actually define a phase. Patterns of default, syntax-determined, phrase stress are argued to result from a prosodic spellout requiring the highest phrase in the spellout domain to correspond to a major prosodic phrase in phonological representation, and carry major phrase stress. Our proposal is part of a growing family of proposals (Legate 2003, Kahnemuyipour 2004, Selkirk and Kratzer 2005, Wagner 2005, Adger 2006, Ishihara 2006, Truckenbrodt 2006) which seek to explain core aspects of sentence prosody in terms of phase theory.

Paul Portner. “Beyond the Common Ground: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Epistemic Modals”. Slides from a talk at the International Conference on Linguistics in Korea, January 19-20, 2007. See also the references.

Chris Tancredi. “A Multi-Model Modal Theory of I-Semantics — Part I: Modals”. Draft ms, The University of Tokyo, January 21, 2007.

Abstract: This paper provides a semantic analysis of restrictions on quantification into doxastic modals uncovered by von Fintel and Iatridou (2003). The restrictions are made to follow from the architecture of a new theory of semantic interpretation, deriving from an asymmetry in the introduction of doxastic and non-doxastic modal bases. The analysis can be seen as a concrete extension of Kratzer (1991) that adds just enough structure to the semantics to be able to give a principled account of the restrictions on quantifying into doxastic modal statements.

Chris just sent this to me and Sabine, so we haven’t read it yet, but it looks interesting.