Author: Stefan Kaufmann

Meeting of interest on 10/26: Ian Roberts, Cambridge

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The Meaning Group is invited to a special session of Magdalena Kaufmann’s Semantics Seminar featuring guest speaker Ian Roberts (Linguistics, Cambridge University). He will be discussing his work on embedded sentences and complementizers. Note that this meeting runs longer than the usual Meaning Group slot (1:00-3:30pm) and takes place in the Business School building: BUSN 122.

Recommended reading: Ian Roberts & Anna Roussou (2003) Syntactic change: a minimalist approach to grammaticalization. Cambridge University Press. Chapter 3: C Elements (pp. 73-130), included below. For more information, contact Magdalena Kaufmann.

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Talk of interest on 09/28: Yael Sharvit, UCLA

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The Logic Colloquium on Friday, September 28 at 2:00pm in Oak 112, will be given by Yael Sharvit (Linguistics, UCLA).

Temporal reference in non-specific indefinites

Non-specific indefinite noun phrases in attitude environments can be transparent or opaque. The interpretation of temporal expressions inside the indefinite is constrained by transparency/opacity. The first fact follows from standard assumptions about attitude reports; the second does not. I propose an account that derives both these facts.

Meeting of interest on May 2: Kratzer 2015

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On Wednesday, May 2, at 2pm in Oak Hall 338, there will be a discussion of Kratzer’s recent paper “Chasing Hook: Quantified Indicative Conditionals.” This is a meeting of Ling 5402 (Semantics II); since the topic ties in with things we recently covered in the Meaning Group, the class graciously opened up its discussion to us.

(The paper is a pre-published version of 2015; it is to appear in the ever-forthcoming book “Conditionals, Probability and Paradox: Themes from the Philosophy of Dorothy Edgington” edited Walters and Hawthorne.)

Talk of interest on April 27: Joe Buffington, Albany Law School

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The Logic Colloquium on Friday, April 27 at 2:30pm in Oak 112, will be given by Joe Buffington (Albany Law School).

The syntax and semantics of contractual offers

I will be talking about the syntax and semantics of contractual offers. In particular, I will be exploring whether there are any linguistic reasons for modeling contractual offers (as in, “If you do X for me, then I’ll do Y for you.”) as conditional promises, as is often taken to be the case in the legal literature.

Talk on April 24: Woojin Chung, NYU

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We will be meeting on Tuesday, April 24, at 11am in Manchester Hall 227, for a talk by Woojin Chung (NYU Linguistics) on “Obligation as counterfactual reasoning”. Abstract below.

Obligation as counterfactual reasoning

Korean and Japanese modal expressions inform about the composition of deontic modality which is not evident from languages that express modal concepts via an auxiliary. They are expressed in terms of a conditional and an evaluative predicate ‘good’. I propose that obligation does not set up the domain of quantification in which the prejacent is evaluated. Instead, it makes deontic judgments as to what would be the case if the prejacent were true or false, respectively. I show that the proposed semantics offers a principled account of Zvolenszky’s puzzle (Zvolenszky 2002) and Ross’s paradox (Ross 1944).

Meeting on April 17: Mizuno and Kaufmann

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We will be meeting on Tuesday, April 17, at 11am in Manchester Hall 227, for a preview of an upcoming conference presentation by Teruyuki Mizuno and Stefan Kaufmann titled “Past-as-Past in Japanese Counterfactuals” (Chicago Linguistic Society, April 26-28).

As a background reading, we recommend Toshiyuki Ogihara’s (2014) “The Semantics of -ta in Japanese Future Conditionals“, in Crnič, Luka and Uli Sauerland (eds.), The Art and Craft of Semantics: A Festschrift for Irene Heim.