The Logic Colloquium on Friday, March 23 at 2:30pm in Oak 112, will be given by Craige Roberts (Linguist, OSU emerita, now NYU visitor and Rutgers affiliate).

Title: Character assassination: de se semantics for indexicals

Abstract: Claim: Both the directly referential semantics and the more recent anaphoric accounts of 1st and 2nd person indexicals offer a picture of indexicality which is empirically and conceptually inadequate. They fail to capture this fact:  Indexicals are essentially perspectival, as reflected in the fact that 1st and 2nd person indexicals are always de se.

Why hasn’t that been evident before?

Here is something important that compositional semantics has taught us: You cannot properly assess the meaning of an expression without considering its use and meaning in embedded contexts. But, as Kaplan drove home, the English 1st and 2nd person pronouns never seem to vary in interpretation in embedded contexts. However, recent work in linguistics has uncovered a wide variety of unrelated languages where the 1st and 2nd person pronouns can be shifted under attitudes. Careful consideration of their shifted meanings offers a new perspective on indexicality. Accordingly, I offer arguments for a de se account of indexicality.

We will be meeting on Tuesday, March 20, at 11am in Manchester 227, to discuss the paper “Will done better” by Fabrizio Cariani and Paolo Santorio (Mind, Volume 127, Issue 505, 1 January 2018, Pages 129-165, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzw004).

We will meet on Tuesday, March 6, at 11-12 in Manchester Hall 227, to discuss Chris Barker’s paper “Why relational nominals make good concealed questions” (Lingua 182, 12-29).

We will meet on Tuesday, February 27, 11am-noon in Manchester Hall 227, to continue our discussion of the paper “The Surface-compositional Semantics of English Intonation” by Mark Steedman (Language, Volume 90, Number 1, March 2014, pp. 2-57). Notice that all the intonation examples have online sound files.

We will meet on Tuesday, February 20, 11am-noon in Manchester Hall 227, to continue our discussion of the paper “The Surface-compositional Semantics of English Intonation” by Mark Steedman (Language, Volume 90, Number 1, March 2014, pp. 2-57). Notice that all the intonation examples have online sound files.

We will meet on Tuesday, February 13, 11am-noon in Manchester Hall 227, to discuss the paper “The Surface-compositional Semantics of English Intonation” by Mark Steedman (Language, Volume 90, Number 1, March 2014, pp. 2-57). Notice that all the intonation examples have online sound files.

We will meet on Tuesday, February 6, 11am-noon in Manchester Hall 227, to discuss the paper “Must φ is felicitous only if φ is not known” by Daniel Goodhue (Semantics and Pragmatics 10).

Our first meeting of the spring semester will take place on Tuesday, January 30, 11:00-12:00 in Manchester Hall Room 227. Jon Gajewski (UConn Linguistics) will be presenting his own work. Title and abstract below.

 

It’s not syntax, I don’t think: neg-raising and parentheticals

English allows a construction in which a sentence contains a parenthetical with a clausal gap, as in (i).  I will refer to phrases such as I think in (i) as clausal parentheticals.  Typically, clausal parentheticals cannot be negative, cf. (ii).

(i) There is beer in the fridge, I think.

(ii) *There is beer in the fridge, I don’t think.

It has been noted that when the clausal parenthetical contains a neg-raising predicate, an apparent doubling of a negation in the main clause is allowed, as in (ii).

(ii)           There is no beer in the fridge, I (don’t) think.

This doubling has been taken to be an argument in favor of syntactic approaches to neg-raising, as in Ross (1973) and Collins & Postal (2014). I will defend an analysis of the doubling in (ii) that is compatible with a semantic/pragmatic approach to neg-raising, as in Horn 1989, Gajewski 2007, Romoli 2013.

The Logic Colloquium on Friday, November 17, at 2pm in Oak Hall 110, will feature Joshua Knobe (Yale).

Moral Disagreement and Moral Semantics

When speakers utter conflicting moral sentences (“X is wrong”/“X is not wrong”), it seems clear that they disagree. It has often been suggested that the fact that the speakers disagree gives us evidence for a claim about the semantics of the sentences they are uttering. Specifically, it has been suggested that the existence of the disagreement gives us reason to infer that there must be an incompatibility between the contents of these sentences (i.e., that it has to be the case that at least one of them is incorrect). This inference then plays a key role in a now-standard argument against certain theories in moral semantics. In this paper, we introduce new evidence that bears on this debate. We show that there are moral conflict cases in which people are inclined to say both (a) that the two speakers disagree and (b) that it is not the case at least one of them must be saying something incorrect. We then explore how we might understand such disagreements. As a proof of concept, we sketch an account of the concept of disagreement and an independently motivated theory of moral semantics which, together, explain the possibility of such cases.

We will have our last meeting of the semester this week (Friday, 2pm in Oak 338).  Sarah Zobel  (University of Tuebingen/MIT) will present some recent work on “as”-phrases.

Modals and the restrictive potential of weak adjunct “as”-phrases

Stump (1985) discusses the behavior of free adjuncts, like the sentence-initial adjuncts in (1). He observes that certain free adjuncts (which he calls “weak”) give rise to an ambiguity in case they co-occur with temporal or modal quantifiers (i.e., modals, adverbs of quantification, Gen/Hab), see (1a): the content contributed by a weak adjunct can be understood as relating to the remainder of the sentence causally or as restricting the co-occurring quantifier. Weak adjuncts contrast with so-called “strong” adjuncts, which only allow for the non-restrictive, causal interpretation, see (1b).

(1)	a.	As a passenger of Lufthansa, Peter would be content.	(weak)
		(Possible: Since Peter is a passenger of Lufthansa, he would be content.)
		(Possible: If Peter were a passenger of Lufthansa, he would be content.)
	b.	Being a passenger of Lufthansa, Peter would be content.	(strong)
		(Only Possible: Since Peter is a passenger of Lufthansa, he would be content.)
		(Not possible: If Peter were a passenger of Lufthansa, he would be content.

In this talk, I take a closer look at weak adjunct “as”-phrases (e.g., (1a)) and further investigate their restrictive possibilities. Starting out, I present an analysis of the semantic contribution of “as”-phrases (inspired by Stump 1985 and Jäger 2003), and propose an account for how the restrictive interpretation arises. I then explore the predictions of the account regarding the restrictive potential of “as”-phrases when they co-occur with different types of modals, which connect to previously observed puzzles in the semantics of modals.