Overview of possible topics.

Short lecture: Exhaustivity everywhere.

Group meeting with enrolled students.

Overview article on situations in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

To read after the lecture: Various works on exhaustive interpretations. Sevi (PDF 1.9 MB), Fox & Hackl (PDF 470 KB), Schulz & van Rooij (PDF 425 KB). In chapter 1, Sevi reports on Gamut's reconstruction of Gricean conversational implicatures, which you find here (PDF 2.3 MB). Use your UMail user name and password to access the readings.

Case study: Exclusive "or".

To read after the lecture: Alonso-Ovalle 2006, chapter 3. Sauerland 2004 (PDF 130 KB). Barrett & Stenner 1971 (PDF 545 KB). Simons 2001 (460 KB). Breheny, Katsos, & Williams 2006 (PDF 318 KB).

Is there such a thing as exclusive disjunction? If so, is it produced via a scalar implicature? If so, how?

More on exhaustivity

Machmer E-10

Note the change of day. The seminar is on Thursday.

We will continue our discussion of disjunctions and exhaustivity. To read after the lecture: Chierchia 2004, Reinhart 2006, Simons 1998.

More on exhaustivity

Machmer E-10

Note the change of day. The seminar is on Thursday.

We will continue our discussion of the exclusive interpretation of disjunction. To read after the lecture: Situations in Natural Language Semantics. Also recommended: Kadmon's dissertation (chapter 4) and Kadmon's paper on Uniqueness. There are two copies of Kadmon's dissertation in the Node.

More on exhaustivity

The seminar meets on Tuesdays again.

We will gradually move away from our case study of disjunction and address the general phenomenon of exhaustive interpretations.

Closed Workshop

For students who are registered for credit. Discussion of semester projects.

Wrapping up exhaustivity

Situation variables and domain restrictions

New readings: Soames on incomplete descriptions (PDF 7.3 MB), Stanley & Szabó on quantifier domain restrictions (PDF 280 KB), Frazier on the processing of novel indefinites (168 KB), Carrie Gillon on domain restriction in Skwxwu7mesh (Semantics Archive).

Do natural languages use special domain restriction variables?

Spring Break

Spring Break

Craige Roberts

Suggested readings: Uniqueness and Definite Noun phrases ( PDF 1.3 MB). Context in Dynamic Interpretation (850 KB).

Craige will be here for a few days, so you have the unique opportunity to talk to her about your semester project, generals paper, dissertation and some such.

Austinian topic situations, epistemic modality, and de re attitude ascriptions.

The syntactic representation of topic situations and other resource situations. De re attitude ascriptions. What are epistemic modals relativized to? Work by Hacquard (dissertation, download from website), von Fintel and Gillies (PDF 288 KB).

Paul Elbourne

Situations and Donkeys

Elbourne (2005): Situations & Individuals.

Monday schedule

No seminar

Workshop on situations and events. First session.

The first session of the workshop will address questions relating to different regions of the verbal projection spine.

Amy Rose Deal will talk about inchoatives and causatives. Chris Davis will explore 'spatial tenses', and Masashi Hashimoto will look into topic situations.

Readings: Kratzer on resultatives; Faller on 'non-experienced' past in Cuzco Quechua (215 KB); Kuroda (450 KB) and Jaeger (215 KB) on topics.

Workshop on situations and events. Second session.

The second session of the workshop will look at statives, temporal dependencies within NPs, and the question whether propositions expressed by utterances of natural languages are always persistent. The discussion leaders are Annahita Farudi (statives), Aynat Rubinstein (temporal dependencies within NPs), and María Biezma (persistence).

Readings: Claudia Maienborn on copula sentences and locatives. Kiyomi Kusumoto on quantification over times in natural languages. Eytan Zweig on donkeys with no fleas.

Maribel Romero

Biased questions. Readings: Romero & Han on negative yes/no questions. van Rooij & Safarova on polar questions.

Workshop on situations and events. Third session.

The last session of the workshop will feature Andrew McKenzie on switch reference in Kiowa, Jan Anderssen on telescoping, and Florian Schwarz on the typology of definites.