week of february 11

just one lecture this week (snowday)

On Monday, I talked about the denotations of common nouns. Our first hypothesis was that English bare nouns like water refer to kinds. In the case of water, we can think of the corresponding kind as the sum of all the water molecules there are. We looked at English constructions that seemed challenges to our hypothesis, but then found data from French that allowed us to look at the apparently problematic English data under a slightly different perspective. We then investigated numeral constructions in Japanese and saw that they provide strong support for the hypothesis that bare nouns refer to kinds. The hypothesis explains why Japanese has to use classifiers with numerals. In Japanese, a numeral can never combine with a noun without the presence of a classifier. If Japanese nouns refer to kinds, classifiers are needed to provide the units that are being counted. We now had to confront the fact that English, unlike Japanese, makes a distinction between count nouns and mass nouns. English count nouns can directly combine with numerals without a mediating classifier. But as one of you observed, in English, number marking seems to do the work that classifiers do in Japanese. Fleshing out that proposal led us to the revised hypothesis that the English common nouns we hear or see are in reality complex and consist of a root and a number suffix, which could be [singular] (an unpronounced zero-suffix) or [plural]. On the revised hypothesis, all roots of English common nouns refer to kinds, hence have exactly the same denotation as Japanese noun roots. The difference between English and Japanese is that English uses number marking to 'cut out' units from kinds, whereas Japanese has a much more elaborate system of classifiers to do that job. Here are the slides I used for the lecture, revised as a result of the discussions we had and enriched by the comments you made.

lab session

The lab session was about relations and functions. The assigned readings were Partee et al., chapter 2 and chapter 3. While you were working on your lab exercises, I encouraged you to be as legalistic as possible and advised you to follow the definitions by the letter, as a lawyer or judge would. My assumption was that in a domain where formal definitions rule, there shouldn’t be room for ambiguities and opinions about intended interpretations. All wrong! My own lab sheet contained ambiguities and possible sources of misunderstanding. To find out more, look at the lab sheet again. I added some clarifications, which appear in red. The answer sheet with extended commentary is here. Come and talk to us if there are still questions after you worked on the exercises on your own, this time with the answer sheet in hand.