compositionality

Manfred Krifka has a very short entry on compositionality in the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. (The first link requires access from the UMass campus. If you are not on campus, you can access the MIT Encyclopedia by logging into the CogNet data base via the UMass library website). A longer and more technical discussion of compositionality can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (by Zoltán Gendler Szabó). If you want to follow up on Szabó's overview article, read Westerståhl (1998) or Kazmi and Pelletier (1998), both from Linguistics and Philosophy. An accessible article on compositionality that is at the same time an elementary introduction to semantic analysis from a linguist's point of view is Barbara Partee's "Lexical Semantics and Compositionality", which appears in the 1995 edition of An Invitation to Cognitive Science (D. Osherson general editor); Volume 1: Language, edited by L. Gleitman & M. Liberman, Cambridge/Mass. (the MIT Press), 311 - 360. Barbara Partee's volume of selected papers very fittingly bears the title Compositionality in Formal Semantics.

conversational implicatures

There is a lot of literature on this topic, and it is hard for me to pick out the 'must reads'. Here are a few possibilities: Entry on Implicatures in the Stanford Encyclopedia; Gamut's reconstruction of Gricean conversational implicatures (PDF 2.3 MB); Larry Horn's article "Implicature" in the Blackwell Handbook of Pragmatics. A special treat are Kai von Fintel's audios on his pragmatics website. His pragmatics lecture notes also include a chapter on conversational implicatures. Richard Breheny and Napoleon Katsos' lectures Implicatures in Language and Cognition at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris can be watched on video. See also Levinson's book and the Grice biography on the bookshelf.

count nouns and mass nouns

The classic piece of work arguing that bare nouns in English refer to kinds is Gregory Carlson's 1977 UMass dissertation (free download from Campus). Also: Susan Rothstein: "Counting and the Mass-Count Distinction". Videos of lectures on the semantics of number and the mass/count distinction by Gennaro Chierchia (the lectures are in English, the site is French).

definite descriptions

The classic readings are Bertrand Russell's "On Denoting" (Mind 1905) and Peter Strawson's "On Referring" (Mind 1950). A very accessible overview of the major semantic conundrums presented by definite descriptions is Irene Heim's "Articles and Definiteness". A collection of recent papers is Marga Reimer and Anne Bezuidenhout's Descriptions and Beyond (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004). The current focus in linguistics is on the properties of different types of definite descriptions: Karen Ebert's often-cited 1971 dissertation on the two definite articles in Fering (an endangered North Frisian dialect) is the most important early reference (it is written in German). For the latest developments in this area consult Florian Schwarz's website, e.g. his handout for the OSU workshop on Presupposition Accommodation. Magdalena Schwager has posted slides from a 2007 presentation on the two Bavarian definite articles (PDF)

disjunction

A good overview of the classical puzzles is Ray Jennings' article in the Stanford Encyclopedia. Two important dissertations that jointly discuss just about all the issues that are currently under active investigation are Mandy Simons' 1998 Cornell University dissertation and Luis Alonso-Ovalle's 2006 UMass dissertation. Both authors also have a number of shorter articles on or that can be downloaded from their websites. A landmark article on disjunctions is Zimmermann's "Free Choice disjunctions and Epistemic Possibilities". A follow-up is Geurts' "Entertaining alternatives: disjunctions as modals".

events

Chapter 3 of Terry Parsons' Semantics Primer gives you a sense of why an event semantics may help with the semantics of adverbial modification. The chapter provides the guiding ideas, but does not implement them within a compositional semantics. The paper that inspired Parson's chapter is Donald Davidson's classical article "The Logical Form of Action Sentences". You can find it in collections of Davidson's papers, e.g in Essays on Actions and Events. Here is a link to a PDF version (17 MB) that you can access with your UMail password. Useful overview articles on mereology (the logic of parts and wholes) and events from a philosophical perspective can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. My Event Argument (contracted with MIT Press) explores the properties of verbal projections (argument association, pluractionality, serialization, voice alternations, Aktionsarten) from a Davidsonian perspective.

fieldwork in semantics

What are semantic data? What are the basic techniques for soliciting semantic data in fieldwork situations? Lisa Matthewson on the methodology of semantic fieldwork.

history of formal semantics in north-america

Barbara Partee: "Reflections of a Formal Semanticist as of February 2005". This is a longer version of the introduction to Compositionality in Formal Semantics. Selected Papers by Barbara H. Partee. Oxford (Blackwell Publishers), 2004.

language & thought

Does the language we speak influence the way we conceptualize events? Gennari, Sloman, Malt & Fitch on motion events in language and cognition.

presuppositions

If you don't read anything else on presuppositions, read Heim's 1990 paper on presupposition projection. Lauri Karttunen's 1974 article "Presupposition and Linguistic Context" is an early example of the "satisfaction" approach to presupposition projection. It can be downloaded from his website. The same website also has Karttunen and Peters' work on presuppositions (referred to as "conventional implicatures") within a two-dimensional semantics. Beaver's handbook article (PostScript) gives an overview of presupposition theories during the last 100 years or so. Beaver also compiled a bibliography of work on presuppositions. The videos of Bart Geurts' Paris lectures on presuppositions discuss the two most influential current theories of presuppositions (the "satisfaction theory", as represented by Karttunen, Stalnaker, and Heim, and the "binding theory", as represented by Geurts and van der Sandt).

universals in semantics

Are there semantic universals among the linguistic universals? The question is difficult in part because of the difficulty to isolate those semantic properties of natural languages that are contributed by cognitive components that are not part of a species-specific language faculty. Which (if any) semantic design features of human languages are not reducible to general properties of our system of thought, which we might very well share with other species? Here is a brand new article on universals in semantics by Kai von Fintel and Lisa Matthewson.