Week 3

Sept 23

Week 4

Sept 30

 Heim Chapter 3. Handout. Making the semantics dynamic. Compare Chapters 2 and 3; the contrast between them sets the stage for many of the debates of the next decades. (See Heim-work handout for more details.)

Pronouns, demonstratives, indexicals. Properties of some "invisible arguments" that make them seem like pronouns, demonstratives, indexicals, or definite descriptions.

Domain restriction of quantifiers and implicitly restricted definites. Debates about whether to capture them via implicit variables, a situation parameter, or other possibilities. Handout

Implicit arguments and perspective with predicates of personal taste. Lasersohn's recent papers and related works. Contextualism in philosophy of language. (More in Week 9)  Handout

Readings: See "Dynamic reading list" (the link is above). Lasersohn, Fillmore, Kaplan, Kölbel, Schlenker, Lewis, Richard. 

Term paper proposal due.  Then make an appointment with me Nov 5-10 to get my feedback and discuss it.

XXX 

Week 10

Nov 18

Implicit arguments, continued. Continued looking at issues related to Lasersohn's "Judge" (non-)argument with predicates of personal taste and epistemic modals, and the problems of faultless disagreement and others. What's in the semantics, what's in the pragmatics? What notion(s) of assertion are involved? Interaction between linguistic and philosophical issues, including issues concerning the contextualism-relativism debates.
Philosophical debates about contextualism in ascriptions of knowledge and elsewhere.

Guest presentations: Heidi Buetow on pragmatic aspects of Tamina Stephenson's account of judge-dependence with predicates of personal taste and epistemic modals; is there a normative aspect to taste-statements that Stephenson doesn't capture? Ana Aguilar Guevara on the possibility of treating assertions as proposals for updating the common ground in certain ways, and can taking that idea seriously help resolve some of the problems in this area? Looking in particular at Section 5 of Stephenson's paper.

BHP: more on recent work by Moltmann on first-person-oriented content, generic one, and relative truth, and how it relates to work by Lasersohn, MacFarlane, Stephenson.
Main readings: Stephenson (2007) in L&P: Judge dependence, epistemic modals, and predicates of personal taste. Moltmann (to appear in Philosophical Studies), Relative truth and the first person. (Also Moltmann (2006) in NLS: Generic one, arbitrary PRO, and the first person.)

Pre-Thanskgiving Wednesday.

"BHP term paper presentation". Topic: What Moltmann, Stephenson, and Lasersohn might say to each other. The main readings will be the readings by those three that have been on the agenda for Weeks 7, 9, and 10, and I'll be trying to relate them more explicitly to each other, to see how Moltmann's proposals might address various problems they identified, and to try to construct a debate they might have with one another and see where it would go.

And we'll include a little bit of discussion of the very interesting (and award-winning) paper "CIA Leaks" by Kai von Fintel and Thony Gillies.

Handout

Readings -- cumulative from weeks 7, 9, and 10, focusing on Lasersohn, Stephenson, and Moltmann.
-- See latest version of Course reading list with links

Syntax Day: Guest presentations by Tom Roeper and Rajesh Bhatt
Implicit arguments and syntax. Lots about control. Debates about what needs to be explicitly in the syntax, with emphasis on studying the kinds of arguments used for and against.

Readings: Roeper 1987 (part 1, part 2), Roeper 2000, Bhatt and Pancheva 2006, Landau 2007, Roeper & Roeper to appear.

Handout - Roeper.   Handout - Bhatt.

Term paper presentations by Suzi and Masashi, Guest presentation by Floris Roelofsen.

Suzi: on first-person-based generic pronoun la gente in Brazilian Portuguese.

Masashi: on constructions related to coming and going in Japanese and point-of-view effects. Arguments against a classical 'empathy' account and for an alternative account.

Floris: on concealed questions, based on a new paper, Aloni & Roelofsen (submitted), arguing that the range of interpretations of concealed questions is much wider than has previously been assumed, and arguing for a pragmatic account.