Semantics etc.

Someone doesn’t know the rules about legitimate exploitation of presupposition accommodation.

I have a draft of my article on conditionals for the new semantics handbook edited by Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn, and Paul Portner. As you’ll see, I have kept the article at a fairly non-technical level while trying not to distort the results in the literature. There are plenty of references to the advanced research literature so that people can get the full and technical story if they wish. [My pipedream -- and the expectation of certain editor friends of mine -- is that I will teach both the informal stories told in this article and the technical implementations and arguments in a book on conditionals that I will be writing any time now.]

There is still time for edits (although the word limit has been reached so new material would have to go in through some exchange with material to be deleted), so I would really appreciate any comments that people might have. But time is of the essence, since the handbook is supposed to go to press very soon.

I’m under strict instructions that the article I’m currently writing should be under 11,000 words. How to keep track of that while using LaTeX (with a lot of mark-up commands that won’t be separate words in the final product and a full bibliography that doesn’t get compiled until the pdf gets produced and thus is not in reflected in the length of the source file)? Easy, run pdflatex on the source (including the bibliography compilation) and count the words in the resulting pdf. But how does that work? My installation includes a ghostscript utility called ps2ascii (I assume that came with MacTex). So, it really is trivial; in Terminal:

ps2ascii test.pdf | wc -w

Answer: 10198. Whew! Still in the game.

This is cool and these features are very cool indeed:

• Honk your Zipcar’s horn with your iPhone to find it in a crowd
• Unlock and lock your Zipcar with your iPhone after scanning your Zipcard at the start of each reservation

This past weekend, my colleague Sally Haslanger and the rest of MIT’s Women’s and Gender Studies program put on a 25 Year Anniversary conference. One of the panels presented a continuous four-generation teacher-student link of women scientists at MIT. An article on the MIT news site tells the story. How great is that? But how great would it be if this were not such a unique story?

Thony and I were very happy to learn that The Philosopher’s Annual has declared “CIA Leaks” to be one of the ten best philosophy articles in 2008.

Just about ten years ago, San and I revived our notion of living in cohousing and she started talking to some other folks with children at Sudbury Valley School. The first official general meeting of what was originally called Sudbury Valley Cohousing but soon became Mosaic Commons Cohousing took place in our living room in Watertown in January 2000. After too many trials and tribulations, we moved into our home in the now physically existing Mosaic Commons Cohousing at Sawyerhill EcoVillage this spring [BTW: there still are homes available; if you want to live in a cool place with cool people just outside Boston/Cambridge, check it out]. The center of our community, our fabulous Common House, was not ready to be used because of various construction and permitting issues. Well, last night, after we had received a (temporary) certificate of occupancy in the morning, we had our first common meal in our Common House. September 1st shall henceforth be known as Common House Day in our neighborhood. Here, courtesy of our friend and neighbor Tim, are some pictures:

Sabine Iatridou and I just finished teaching a three week class on modality at the LSA summer institute in Berkeley. Since the Berkeley class website isn’t easily accessible, here are our teaching materials:

1. Syllabus
2. Class 1 Handout: Intro and must
3. Class 2 Handout: Some syntax
4. Anatomy of a modal construction
5. How to say ought in Foreign
6. Class 5 Handout: Modality and tense
7. Class 6 Handout: Imperatives
8. Bibliography

24.979 Topics in Syntax & Semantics
von Fintel, Iatridou
MW 1:30-3
66-160

“Without glue, what do we do?”

The theme of our seminar is the question of how meanings are put together when there seems to be a lack of explicit marking of how things fit together. One famous example (seminally studied by Stump) is the variety of meanings a free adjunct can take on:

(1) Having long arms, John can reach the ceiling.
(2) Standing on a chair, John can reach the ceiling.

We will talk about the syntax & semantics of such adjuncts, of parentheticals, of free relatives, of appositive relatives, of conjunction, of concessives, of conditionals, and of paratactic coordinations. The reading list will evolve over the course of the semester, since this is a topic that is mostly new to us. We will be learning with you as we go along.

In a departure from our usual seminar format, we are meeting twice a week in more bite-sized chunks of time. To make this format be productive, preparatory reading will be even more important than usual.

Apart from keeping up with the reading and participating vigorously in the seminar discussions, which is an expectation for all seminar participants, registered students will write a term paper that is at least tangentially related to the topic(s) of the seminar. Early consultation about the term papers is advised.

For the first meeting on Wednesday September 9 at 1:30pm in Room 66-160, the preparatory reading is a (not completely randomly chosen) article on the meaning of conjunction:

Txurruka, Isabel Gómez. 2003. The natural language conjunction and. Linguistics and Philosophy 26(3). 255–285. doi:10.1023/A:1024117423963.

Everybody who intends to attend the seminar should read this article beforehand and think of questions and comments about it for the seminar discussion.

A paper I reviewed (three rounds) just appeared. It contains no acknowledgments, no thanks to the reviewers. The editor of the journal did not write to the reviewers to announce their decision to publish the paper (which I had whole-heartedly endorsed), they did not inform us of the fact that the paper was just published.

Needless to say, S&P does not behave this way and does not let authors behave this way.