Workshop in Semantics and Philosophy of Language

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Aidan Gray (Chicago, grad student) for the final workshop talk of the year.

‘Proper Names and the Lexicon’

DATE: Friday, June 3, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 102

ABSTRACT: There is a persistent, if somewhat obscure, idea in the philosophical literature that the idea of translation does not apply straightforwardly to proper names. I try to work out in what sense, if any, this might be true. I argue that seeing the sense in which proper names do resist translation should make us question orthodox assumptions about the relation between form and meaning in proper names. This suggests a radical revision of our conception of the place of proper names in the lexicon.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Yusuke Kubota (University of Tokyo) for the seventh workshop talk of the quarter.

‘Revisiting the progressive/perfect ambiguity of “-te iru” in Japanese: A scale-based analysis’

DATE: Friday, May 27, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 102

ABSTRACT: The interpretation of the Japanese aspectual marker “-te iru” is notoriously complex, but at its core is the opposition of the ‘progressive’ vs. the so-called ‘resultative perfect’ interpretations, sensitive to the lexical aspect of the predicate it attaches to: with activity predicates, “-te iru” induces the progressive interpretation (analogous to English progressive) while with achievement predicates, it gives rise to the so-called ‘resultative perfect’ interpretation. With accomplishments and degree achievements, the sentences are often ambiguous between the progress and the resultative perfect interpretations. Building on recent scale-based approaches to gradable predicates and verb meanings (cf., e.g., Kennedy & McNally 2005, Kennedy & Levin 2008), I will propose a uniform analysis of this apparent ambiguity of “-te iru” which systematically predicts the correlation between lexical aspect and -te iru’s progressive/perfect meanings.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Emma Borg (University of Reading) for our sixth workshop talk of the quarter.

‘Minimal Semantics and the Nature of Context-sensitivity’

DATE: Friday, May 20, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 102

ABSTRACT: There is a currently lively debate in semantics between theories which place stringent limits on semantically relevant context-sensitivity (varieties of minimal semantics) and those which take semantically relevant context-sensitivity to be much more pervasive (of which the best known form is contextualism). This talk tries to get clearer on exactly what is at stake in the debate: what are the notions of context-sensitivity in play and what exactly are the participants to the debate disagreeing about?

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Jason Bridges (Chicago) for our fifth workshop talk of the quarter.

‘Contextualism, Pragmatism, and Provincialism’

DATE: Friday, May 13, 2011
TIME: 10:00am-12:00 pm (note the change in time and place)
PLACE: Wieboldt 203 (note the change in time and place)

The paper can be downloaded here.

ABSTRACT: The recent flowering of “contextualist” doctrines is widely viewed as a natural consequence of a shift to a more pragmatic perspective on meaning, in which the communicative and expressive context of an utterance is seen as playing a more thoroughgoing role in shaping meaning than had previously been acknowledged. But in fact, mainstream contextualist doctrines seem to follow from the new pragmatic orientation only given dubious assumptions about the relevant features of communicative and expressive contexts. This charge is developed through consideration of a widely accepted contextualist treatment of the word “rich”, here called economic contextualism. The case against economic contextualism involves detailed examination of empirical and theoretical issues of a sort that have been ignored in the contextualist literature. The final sections of the paper indicate how arguments of this character might be applied to other forms of contextualism and trace some of their general implications, including the threat they pose to contextualist approaches to skeptical puzzles, and the space they open for views that allow for pervasive context-sensitivity but are quite far from the doctrines currently advanced under the “contextualist” banner.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to welcome Eric McCready (Aoyama Gakuin University) for our fourth workshop talk of the quarter.

‘Hedging, Cooperation and Conditionals’

DATE: Friday, May 6, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 102

ABSTRACT: Communication is generally supposed to be cooperative in a way characterized by Gricean maxims. However, in many situations, the interests of communicators are opposed and there is incentive to be deceptive or to withhold information. Why then does cooperation arise? This question has been widely discussed in economics and biology in the context of game theory. Using (a version of) a model from this literature, I consider ways in which negative results of actual noncooperative linguistic behavior can be avoided by further linguistic acts. The result is analyses of hedges, for damage limitation on semantic content, and so-called relevance conditionals, for avoiding consequences of bad pragmatic discourse moves.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to present Hans Kamp (Universität Stuttgart), who will give the third workshop talk of the quarter.

‘Articulated contexts and their use in the interpretation of Definite Noun Phrases’

DATE: Friday, April 29, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 102

ABSTRACT: The topic of this talk is a formally characterized general concept of context – that of an ‘articulated context’ – and some of the uses to which such contexts can be put.

The most distinctive properties of articulated contexts are:

(a) they unify the utterance contexts known from the work of Montague, Cresswell, Kaplan and others (who use such contexts to deal with indexicals and certain other directly referential expressions) with the discourse contexts of DRT and other forms of dynamic semantics;

(b) they also incorporate other information, such as (i) encyclopaedic knowledge of the sort that most of us carry around and use in the interpretation of, e.g. proper names and, (ii) where this is relevant, information of the perceptually accessible environment.

Articulated contexts were motivated by the need for a classification of definite noun phrases in relation to how their reference presuppositions may be resolved. The various types of definite NPs differ from each other, I will argue, in terms of the component or components of the articulated context that the interpreter may resort to in order to resolve their respective presuppositions.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to present Silver Bronzo (Chicago, grad student), who will give the second workshop talk of the quarter.

‘The Speech Act and Its Components: Two Readings of Austin’s Analysis’

DATE: Friday, April 22, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 102

ABSTRACT: In this paper I distinguish and contrast two readings of Austin’s famous analysis of speech acts: an aggregative reading, according to which each speech act is a sum of conceptually detachable components, and an organic reading, according to which each speech act is a unity whose discernible components hang together conceptually. I argue that contemporary philosophy of language has tended to inherit Austin’s theory of speech acts—to the extend that it has inherited it at all—in accordance with the aggregative reading. And yet, I suggest that it is the organic reading that brings out the real philosophical attractiveness of Austin’s analysis. On the textual level, I argue that Austin’s wavers between an aggregative and an organic understanding of the relationship between the total speech act and its components.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to present Tommy Grano (Chicago, grad student), who will give our first workshop talk of the quarter.

‘Mental action and event structure in the semantics of try‘

DATE: Friday, April 15, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 102

ABSTRACT: Sharvit (2003) proposes a semantics for try inspired by Landman’s (1992) account of progressive aspect. This paper discusses two empirical shortcomings of Sharvit’s analysis and proposes a new solution that retains Sharvit’s view that try has an aspectual component but argues that (a) as suggested by much work on the philosophy of action (see e.g. Lorini and Herzig 2008), volitional events include an initial stage corresponding to a ‘mental action’ and (b) try picks out the ‘mental action’ stage of an event.

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is pleased to present Matt Teichman (Chicago, grad student), who will give our fourth and final workshop talk of the quarter.

‘Is There a Generic Quantifier?’

DATE: Friday, March 11, 2011
TIME: 11:00am-1:00 pm
PLACE: Cobb 107

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the two principal strategies for developing a compositional semantics for generic sentences: the kind theory and the quantificational theory. First, it tries to clarify some of the murkier issues that come up in the course of the debate between these two positions, in particular pointing out the danger of equivocating over two distinct senses of ‘quantifier.’ Next, it intervenes in this debate by examining the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction. If the quantificational theory of generics is correct, then generic statements ought to behave in just the same way as quantified statements under permutations of context. The fact that they do not gives the kind theory a leg up over the quantificational theory, and teaches us something about the distinctive way in which generic statements interact with conversational context.

The Workshop in Semantics and Philosophy of Language is pleased to welcome Peter Klecha (Chicago, grad student), who will be delivering the third talk of the winter quarter.

‘Familiarity and Modal Subordination’

The meeting will take place on Friday, February 25, from 12:00pm-1:30pm in the Linguistics lounge, on the third floor of Classics.

ABSTRACT: This paper raises the empirical point that modal subordination is not always obligatory, and that moreover, this is a point of lexical variation, based on the following data.

(a) Don’t go near that bomb! It’ll explode! (conditional reading)
(b) Don’t go near that bomb! It’s going to explode! (conditional or nonconditional reading)

Some modals, like _will_, which I call definite modals, undergo modal subordination obligatorily, and some, like _gonna_, which I call nondefinite modals, do so optionally. I propose a dynamic semantics in which, following from Frank (1997), information states are possible discourse referents. I also propose that these referents are potentially subject to familiarity presuppositions, whose presence makes a modal definite, and whose absence makes a modal nondefinite; this is the crucial factor in differentiating (a) and (b).