“Steve Yablo”:http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/home.html just pointed out to me that there is “another Kai”:http://fintel.mit.edu/blog/archives/000031.html in the field.
“Kai Wehmeier”:http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/lps/home/fac-staff/faculty/wehmeier/ is Assistant Professor of Logic & Philosophy of Science at UC Irvine. Looking at Kai’s CV, I see that he grew up near “Münster”:http://www.muenster.de/, which is where I grew up, and that he attended the “University of Münster”:http://www.uni-muenster.de/de/index.html, which is where I spent the first few years of my undergraduate time.
On his homepage, he lists some work that seems of considerable interest to semantics, in particular a paper in progess called “In the Mood”:http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/lps/home/fac-staff/faculty/wehmeier/inthemood.pdf, which deals with the semantic effects of mood-marking, as in sentences like
bq. Under certain circumstances, everyone who is poor would have been rich.
A related three-page abstract appeared in a volume of conference proceedings:
bq. “World Travelling and Mood Swings”:http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/lps/home/fac-staff/faculty/wehmeier/swings.pdf, in: Benedikt Löwe, Thoralf Räsch, and Wolfgang Malzkorn (eds.), Foundations of the Formal Sciences II, Dordrecht: Kluwer (Trends in Logic), 2003.
This all concerns topics I also work on. [Sabine and I even taught "a class":http://web.mit.edu/24.979/www/ on this a couple of years ago.] As usual, it will take me a while to work through his papers.
And here I thought “World Travelling and Mood Swings” was going to be a psychiatric paper about the prevalence of depression and bipolar disorder in the Lonely Planet scene!