If you want to read some essential articles in semantics over the January break, I recommend Portner and Partee's collection:

Formal Semantics. The Essential Readings.

Edited by Paul Portner and Barbara Partee. Oxford (Blackwell Publishers), 2002.

Publisher's description: "The formal semantics approach to the study of natural language semantics was developed through active dialogue between linguistically minded philosophers and philosophically minded linguists and has become increasingly integrated into theoretical linguistics. Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings is a collection of seminal papers that have shaped the field of formal semantics in linguistics.The book covers key central themes and includes both an editorial introduction and extensive references. It is a vital resource for students and scholars of semantics and the philosophy of language."

A collection of seminal papers in natural language semantics:

Compositionality in Formal Semantics

Selected Papers by Barbara Partee. Oxford (Blackwell Publishers), 2004.

Publisher's description: "Barbara H. Partee has played a central role in developing the now-flourishing field of formal semantics, bringing the formal semantic approach developed by logicians together with a linguistically sophisticated account of the syntax of natural languages. She has continued to be a major contributor to semantics, offering general ideas that have helped to clarify the character of the enterprise as well as imaginative and persuasive detailed analyses.Compositionality in Formal Semantics is a collection of Partee 's papers that have been influential in the field but are not all readily available, and includes a new introductory essay in which Partee reflects on how her thinking and the field of semantics have developed over the past 35 years. This collection is invaluable both for understanding the history and evolution of the field and for its contribution to ongoing research."

A selection of essential papers in the philosophy of language:

Readings in the Philosophy of Language

By Peter Ludlow. Cambridge/Mass. (The MIT Press), 1997.

Publisher's description: "Throughout the history of ideas, various branches of philosophy have spun off into the natural sciences, including physics, biology, and perhaps most recently, cognitive psychology. A central theme of this collection is that the philosophy of language, at least a core portion of it, has matured to the point where it is now being spun off into linguistic theory. Each section of the book contains historical (twentieth-century) readings and, where available, recent attempts to apply the resources of contemporary linguistic theory to the problems under discussion. This approach helps to root the naturalization project in the leading questions of analytic philosophy. Although the older readings predate the current naturalization project, they help to lay its conceptual foundations. The main sections of the book, each of which is preceded by an introduction, are Language and Meaning, Logical Form and Grammatical Form, Descriptions, Names, Demonstratives, and Attitude Reports.

The collection is not intended as a final report on a mature line of philosophical inquiry. Rather, its purpose is to show students what doing real philosophy is all about and to let them share in the excitement as philosophers enter a period in which how philosophy of language is conducted could change in fundamental ways."

Shadows. Unlocking their Secrets from Plato to our Time.

By Roberto Casati. Vintage books, 2004.

I recommend this book if you think events might be suspicious entities that we should not admit into the universe of entities that we quantify over.

"The world of normal experience is worse than a zoo: it's a jungle hiding metaphysically suspect creatures. Just consider a hole in Swiss cheese, the beauty of a flower, the number two, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the Mona Lisa smile, Mike Tyson's fists. What is a hole or a smile? Could we define them? What is a fist? Is it an object different from the hand? Let's add shadows to the list of suspect things. Shadows, which are always in view, do odd things that strike the popular fancy, but they also do even odder things that give us food for thought.

For one thing, shadows are reciprocally penetrable; two shadows (made by two separate lights) can occupy the same space without bothering one another. Or a shadow can split up and still be the same shadow even if its pieces occupy spaces that are not attached; the shadow of a statue can fall partly on the ground and partly on the table the statue stands on.

Two distinct shadows can unite and give the impression of a single shadow while still remaining distinct: the part of the statue's shadow that lies on the ground, but even without a dividing line they are separate shadows. And if we turn off the light and then turn it on again, we can't be sure of getting the same shadow as before...

Rocks (and all other material things) serve as our models for things that behave "well"; certainly they behave very differently from shadows: two rocks cannot occupy the same space, and a rock is no longer a rock if we smash it to pieces. If we meld two rocks together, we create a new, third rock, and the other two disappear. A rock seems to move through space in a continuous manner. If we leave a rock somewhere, we come back to find it in the same place; and if we cannot find it, we know that's because someone moved it." From Shadows, p. 42.

Keywords: ontology, ontological commitment, criterion of identity, objects, logic & ontology;

A more academic discussion of strange entities is:

Holes and Other Superficialities.

By Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi. Cambridge (The MIT Press), 1994.

Keyword: holes

If you want to get serious about places, events, and "mereotopology":

Parts and Places. The Structures of Spatial Representation.

By Roberto Casati and Achille Varzi. Cambridge (The MIT Press), 1999.

Keywords: mereology, events;

A collection of Davidson's classical papers on actions and events:

Essays on Actions and Events

Oxford University Press, 2nd edition 2001.

Publisher's description: "Donald Davidson has prepared a new edition of his classic 1980 collection of Essays on Actions and Events, including two additional essays. In this seminal investigation of the nature of human action, Davidson argues for an ontology which includes events along with persons and other objects. Certain events are identified and explained as actions when they are viewed as caused and rationalized by reasons; these same events, when described in physical, biological, or physiological terms, may be explained by appeal to natural laws. The mental and the physical thus constitute irreducibly discrete ways of explaining and understanding events and their causal relations. Among the topics discussed are: freedom to act; weakness of the will; the logical form of talk about actions, intentions, and causality; the logic of practical reasoning; Hume's theory of the indirect passions; and the nature and limits of decision theory. The introduction, cross-references, and appendices emphasize the relations between the essays and explain how Davidson's views have developed."

Keywords: Donald Davidson, events;

David Lewis' classical book about possible individuals and possible worlds:

On The Plurality of Worlds.

By David Lewis. Oxford (Blackwell Publishers), 1986.

"As the realm of sets is for mathematicians, so logical space is a paradise for philosophers. We have only to believe in the vast realm of possibilia, and there we find what we need to advance our endeavors. We find the wherewithal to reduce the diversity of notions we must accept as primitive, and thereby to improve the unity and economy of the theory that is our professional concern - total theory, the whole of what we take to be true. What price paradise? If we want the theoretical benefits that talk of possibilia brings,the most straightforward way to gain honest title to them is to accept such talk as the literal truth. It is my view that the price is right, if less spectacularly so than in the mathematical parallel. The benefits are worth their ontological cost. Modal realism is fruitful; that gives us good reason to believe that it is true. Good reason; I do not say it is conclusive." On the Plurality of Worlds, p. 4.

Keywords: possible worlds, possible objects;

Is logic relevant for the semantics of natural languages? An influential positive answer was given by the British philosopher Paul Grice. A very readable book about Grice:

Paul Grice. Philosopher and Linguist.

By Siobhan Chapman. New York (Palgrave) 2005.

"It may seem surprising that the middle-aged British philosopher interested in the role of individual speakers in creating meaning should cite as an influence the young American linguist notorious for dismissing issues of use in his pursuit of a universal theory of language. But Grice was inspired by Chomsky's demonstration in his work on syntax of how 'a region for long found theoretically intractable by scholars (like Jespersen) of the highest intelligence could, by discovery and application of the right apparatus, be brought under control'. Less formally, he expressed admiration for an approach that did not offer 'piecemeal reflections on language' but rather where 'one got a picture of the whole thing'." Paul Grice. Philosopher and Linguist, pages 85, 86.

Chris Potts' review of Paul Grice. Philosopher and Linguist.

Keywords: Grice, implicature, pragmatics, modularity & language;

A very important recent book about preferred interpretations that you can read online via the CogNet database:

Presumptive Meanings. The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature.

By Stephen Levinson. Cambridge/Mass. (The MIT Press), 2000.

"A generalized implicature is, in effect, a default inference, one that captures our intuitions about a preferred or normal interpretation. The notion of a preferred interpretation is not one that has any special currency in the theory of language at the present time. Indeed, it is a notion that is currently either ignored or subject to virulent attack by some pragmaticists, psycholinguists, and workers in artificial intelligence. In defense of this notion, I develop a number of arguments both positive and negative. First, looking back at Grice's program, we see that such a notion (contrary to some recent commentary) was central to his concerns; and those concerns, whatever the differences in modern implementation, seem perfectly current today. Second, I diagnose that one source of the current theoretical resistence to GCIs is a simplistic overall scheme for a theory of communication, within which there is no place for a theory of preferred interpretation. I argue that there is overwhelming evidence for the need for such a theory, evidence much broader than that for GCIs themselves, and consequently that our overall scheme must provide a nich of an appropriate sort in any case. When this is appreciated, much of the resistance to GCIs should wither away.

Next, I produce an argument from design to the effect that a system of preferred interpretation would be much too effective a device in communication for any naturally evolved system of communication to fail to have developed such a thing." Presumptive Meanings, p. 11.

Keywords: implicature, default interpretation;

It is sometimes said that the kind of semantics we do is "model-theoretic". But the Heim & Kratzer textbook does not teach model-theoretic semantics. A short book on the uses and misuses of model-theoretic semantics is:

The Concept of Logical Consequence

By John Etchemendy. Cambridge/Mass. (Harvard University Press), 1990. Reprinted by CSLI Publications, 1999.

"Anyone whose study of logic has gone beyond the most rudimentary stages is familiar with the standard, model-theoretic definitions of the logical properties. According to these definitions, a sentence is logically true if it is true in all models; an argument is logically valid, its conclusion a consequence of its premises, if the conclusion is true in every model in which all the premises are true. These definitions, along with the additional machinery needed to understand them, are set forth in every introductory textbook in mathematical logic. In these texts we are taught how to delineate a class of models for a simple language and how to provide a recursive definition of truth in a model - in short, how to construct a simple model-theoretic semantics. Once this semantic theory is in place, the model-theoretic definitions of the logical properties can be applied." The Concept of Logical Consequence, p. 1.

"Briefly put, my claim is that Tarski's analysis is wrong, that his account of logical truth and logical consequence does not capture, or even come close to capturing, any pretheoretic conception of the logical properties. The thrust of my argument is primarily at the conceptual level, but again the main impact is at the extensional. Applying the model-theoretic account of consequence, I claim, is no more reliable a technique for ferreting out the genuinely valid arguments of a language than is applying a purely syntactic definition. Neither technique is guaranteed to yield an extensionally correct specification of the language's consequence relation." The Concept of Logical Consequence, p. 6.

Keywords: Tarski's truth definition, model theory, logical consequence, logical truth;

An introductory book about pronouns and binding that complements the Heim & Kratzer textbook:

Binding Theory

By Daniel Büring. Cambridge (Cambridge University Press), 2005.

Publisher's description:
Binding theory seeks to explain how different kinds of nominal expressions such as names, noun phrases and pronouns have anaphoric relations amongst one another, and how they come to have reference to things in the world. This textbook provides a thorough and comprehensive introduction to modern binding theory. Starting at a very basic level, it introduces the reader to a huge variety of nominal and especially pronominal expressions from the world's languages, the ways they can be used, and current theorising about their grammatical properties and their interpretation. Daniel Büring discusses a wide range of cross-linguistic data and theoretical approaches, and unlike in existing introductions, pairs the discussion of syntactic facts with a detailed introduction to the semantic interpretation of binding structures. Written in a clear and accessible style, and with numerous exercises and examples, this textbook will be invaluable to graduate and advanced undergraduate students of syntax and semantics.