Workshop in Semantics and Philosophy of Language

This Friday Nov 21, from 11:00am-1:00pm, the Workshop in Semantics and Philosophy of Language will host a talk from Delia Graff Fara (Dept of Philosophy, Princeton University). The talk is entitled: “De-re Modality: Identity Theory versus Counterpart Theory”: the abstract is below. It will talk place in the Landahl Linguistics Research Center, which is in the basement of Social Sciences.

It is likely that Prof Fara will have time to meet with interested graduate students on Friday afternoon. Please let me know if you are interested in meeting with her.

Many philosophers deny certain intuitively eminently plausible identity claims: e.g., that a person is identical to her body, that a person’s body is identical to the matter that makes it up, and that artifacts such as paper books and clay statues are identical to the  paper and clay that compose them.

I present a counterpart-theory semantics for de-re modality that’s devised in order to support certain metaphysical view about identity that many philosphers reject.  I argue that the semantics is preferable to Lewis’s version of counterpart theory in that it avoids many of the purely semantic (as opposed to metaphysical) problems with the theory

On Nov 14th from 11:00am-1:20pm in the Landahl Linguistics Research Center , Nat Hansen will present a paper called “Color adjectives and Radical Contextualism”.

The meeting will be a special joint meeting with the Wittgenstein Workshop

On Friday Oct 24th, Paul Portner (Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University) will present to the workshop from 11:00am-1:00pm in the Landahl Linguistics Research Center (in the basement of Social Sciences). The title and abstract for the talk are below.

Scales of Probability

Paul Portner

Expressions of necessity and possibility are standardly analyzed as operators with meanings of the kind familiar from modal logic, that is as quantifiers over possible worlds, and Kratzer (1981) extends this treatment to a wider variety of expressions.  In particular, she is able to give an account not only of It is necessary that and It is possible that, but also such forms as It is probable that, There is a good possibility that, and There is a slight possibility that.  However, as pointed out by Portner (forthcoming), it seems that the formal theory she develops - involving two paramters of interpretation, the modal base and ordering source, and multiple modal forces defined in terms of these - is unable to explain the open-ended nature of the distinctions:  there is no limit to the number of grades of probability we need to recognize:

possible, somewhat possible, quite possible, entirely possible, probably, extremely probable, 60% probability that, 61% probability that, chance, slight chance, good chance, really good chance, incredibly good chance, two in three chance, necessary, somewhat necessary, completely necessary, absolutely necessary ….

Another feature these Probability and Possibility Expressions (PPEs) is that they are more or less normal adjectives, adverbs, and nouns;  as such most (if not all) of them are gradable.  Thus somewhat possible stands in need of an analysis parallel to somewhat tall.  (In this, they differ from modal auxiliaries and modal particles.)  Whatever deep account we give of the meanings of PPEs, whether it involves possible worlds or some other device, it must fit into the syntactic and semantic mechanics of the theory of gradable expressions (e.g. Kennedy 2007).  In particular, gradale PPEs must be given analyses using scales.

I will briefly describe two approaches to developing a scale-based semantics for PPEs.  The first is based on probability theory:  scales for PPEs are constructed out of the probability scale, i.e. the interval [0,1].  The second is based on modal semantics;  in particular, we derive scales of propositions from the modal base/ordering source framework of Kratzer, as sketched in Portner (forthcoming;  see also Villalta 2007).  In this talk, I’ll spend more time developing the ideas behind the second approach, working out the theoretical details to the extent that time permits.

The workshop will have its last meeting of the year this
Friday (June 13) from 11:00am-1:00pm in the Landahl Center.
Ivano Caponigro (UCSD) will be presenting some of his recent
work (actually joint work with Maria Polinsky from Harvard).
The abstract is below.

Most languages (including English) distinguish between
relative clauses, embedded declarative clauses, and embedded
interrogative clauses in various syntactic ways (e.g.
complementizers, gaps, wh-words, extraction). The syntactic
behavior matches the semantic one, since all these embedded
clauses differ in their meaning as well. In this talk, we
present a language that exhibits a very different pattern.
In Adyghe, a North-West Caucasian language spoken in
southern Russia and some parts of Turkey, the very
same “mystery clause” is used to convey the various meanings
that relative clauses, embedded declaratives, and embedded
interrogatives convey in other languages. We show that (i)
Adyghe’s “mystery clause” is a headless relative clause, and
that (ii) the syntax-semantics mapping in Adyghe can be
accounted for by means of tools that have already been
independently argued for in the grammar (set formation,
concealed questions, polarity operators, etc.). More
generally, Adyghe and its extensive use relative clauses to
convey various meanings show that the syntax-semantics
interface across languages is more varied that it is usually
assumed, but it can still be handled without enriching the
conceptual apparatus of the grammar.

On May 30th from 11:00am-1:00pm in the Landahl Center, Daniel Rothschild (Columbia University) will be giving a talk. The title and abstract are below.

Making Dynamic Semantics Explanatory

Heim’s classic paper “On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions” proposed a replacement of truth-conditional semantics with a dynamic semantics that treats meanings as instructions to update the common ground. Heim showed that this system easily predicts the basic pattern of presupposition projection (the way presuppositions of complex sentences are inherited from the presuppositions of their parts). The classic objection to this program, widely considered definitive, is that the dynamic semantics for binary connectives is stipulative, and other, equally natural treatments fail to make the right predictions about presupposition projection. I give a variation on Heim’s system that is designed to escape this objection.

Our very own Nat Hansen will be presenting this Friday from 11:15am-1:15pm in the Landahl Center. Click on the link below to obtain a copy of the paper.
Radicalism and Rule-Following

Peter Lasersohn’s talk on May 9 will take place from 12:30-2:30pm in the Landahl Linguistics Research Center. See below for the abstract and a copy of the paper.

Quantification and perspective in relativist semantics
Peter Lasersohn, UIUC

A common feature of recent relativist semantic analyses is that they treat sentences as expressing contents which are true or false not only relative to a possible world, but also to some other parameter such as an individual, perspective, epistemic state, or standard of taste. The use of such parameters raises interesting questions for the relation between syntax and semantics — questions which parallel, to some extent, the issues pertaining to the debate about “unarticulated constituents”. If a definite truth value can be assigned to a sentence content only if some particular value for one of these parameters is supplied, must that value be the denotation of some (perhaps hidden) syntactic element of the sentence? Or is it reasonable to treat such parameters purely as indices, with no syntactic correlates? Advocates and critics of relativism have both taken a wide variety of positions on such issues, from claims that a proper use of hidden arguments rather than indices supports a more conventional contextualist semantic theory over a relativist one; to claims that such theories are intertranslatable, and therefore equivalent; to claims that both non-standard indices and relativistically interpreted hidden arguments are necessary; to claims that these non-standard parameters function purely as indices, with no syntactic representation. In this paper I review the arguments for these various positions, attempt a clarification of the issues, and present semantic and syntactic evidence in favor of a relativist semantic analysis in which non-standard parameters are not syntactically represented. A relatively novel feature of this analysis is the use of “index binding” operators, which allow simultaneous modal and objectual quantification.
Quantification and perspective in relativist semantics