the week of february 25

lectures

Since the topic came up in connection with Chomsky's video-taped lecture, we discussed some foundational questions for semantics, in particular the parallel between phonetics and semantics that Chomksy evokes right at the beginning of his lecture. Drawing different conclusions from this parallel, we reconfirmed the need for a truth-conditional component of meaning. On Monday, we reviewed the main modules that contribute to the overall meaning of an utterance. In addition to truth-conditional content, there are conventional implicatures, generalized conversational implicatures and particularized conversational implicatures. We did not have much to say about particularized conversational implicatures, since their computation relies largely on non-linguistic, often idiosyncratic, knowledge components. A large part of this course is going to be about truth-conditional content. But we will have occasional glimpses into other modules of meaning. Discourse particles are examples of expressions that have no truth-conditional content, but only contribute conventional implicatures, which we can think of in terms of appropriateness conditions. Generalized conversational implicatures are defeasible default inferences whose exact nature is currently under active investigation. On Wednesday, we discussed Grice's way of deriving conversational implicatures with the help of maxims for cooperative interaction, and then looked at scalar implicatures, which are a particular kind of generalized conversational implicatures linked to Grice's maxim of Quantity. Is the mechanism that generates scalar implicatures a computational mechanism that is part of grammar, or is it a pragmatic reasoning mechanism of the kind Grice had in mind? Here are the handouts: Modules of Meaning and Generalized Conversational Implicatures.

lab session

Florian conducted a lab session about experimental design. Here are the materials for this lab session: a short introduction to experimental design, the actual lab sheet with the exercises, and Florian's comments on your lab work. The comments on your group work are highly instructive and will be very useful for your project. Thinking about how to conduct an experiment to test hypotheses about conversational implicatures will also give you a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of implicatures.

first take-home exam

The first take-home exam was given out on Friday, and is due on February 29 at the beginning of class. No extensions, no electronic, or hand-written submissions (but you can insert mathematical symbols by hand), no e-mail consultations. It's a take-home exam, so you have to do it on your own. The UMass Academic Honesty Policy applies. I have not given you permission to collaborate on take-home exams. There are all kinds of other things you can do to help each other with this particular exam, however: discuss the content of the relevant chapters from Partee et al. with each other. Talk about how to do semantic fieldwork, going through Lisa Matthewson's paper together. Discuss the lab work you have done so far and the answer sheets with your group.

video: chomsky on semantics

If you have a high-speed internet connection, watch this fascinating video (almost two hours): Noam Chomsky on "On Referring revisited". On Referring is a famous article by the philosopher Peter Strawson, but the video is really about semantics in a very broad sense and addresses many of the topics we have already been talking about in this class. Chomsky comes across as fairly combative in this video, but if you listen closely and interpret what you hear as it was intended, most of what he is saying is fairly uncontroversial. Chomsky draws a very helpful comparison between questions that are interesting for a phonetician and what might be interesting questions for a semanticist. Taken literally, some of what Chomsky says may sound shocking, for example his statement that "there is no notion of reference in natural language". But what he really seems to mean (if you consider what he says in the rest of the lecture and the discussion) is that if all you are doing in semantics is saying things like Shakespeare refers to Shakespeare or water refers to water, you are not saying anything interesting, you are, in fact, completely missing out on what could be interesting questions in semantics. We are getting a glimpse into what interesting questions may be when Chomsky talks about the way humans construct the notion of an individual that a name like London refers to, for example, or when he turns metaphysical questions about personal identity into puzzles about human cognition. We discussed similar questions when we talked about shared modes of individuation as a prerequisite for the successful use of proper names by the members of a speech community. The conclusion to draw, I think, is not that we should no longer talk about reference and truth in natural language semantics, hence stop wondering about how humans manage to talk about the world. This would be like telling a phonetician to stop talking about the acoustic properties of sounds and ban all acoustical terms from his or her theories. If you are interested in sound perception, you need to talk about how certain acoustical properties, hence actual properties of sounds, are perceived. If you are interested in semantics, you need to talk about how humans relate linguistic expressions to things in the world that they refer to or situations in which they are true. This is ultimately not incompatible with Chomsky's internalist view holding that the semantics for natural languages would work in exactly the way it actually does if there was no world outside of our brains. If this is what defines an internalist view of meaning, few practicing semanticists would object. Even if there was no world outside our brains, we would still think there was, and native speakers' assumptions about how the expressions of their language relate to the world would be exactly what they actually are.

jerry fodor on semantics

If you want to think some more about what semantics is and why even an internalist approach to semantics needs to address the relation between representations and the world read this interview with the philosopher Jerry Fodor from the Brazilian electronic journal Revista Virtual de Estudos da Linguagem, 5(8), 2007.