Kai von Fintel » Drafts

“Must” … Stay … Strong!

kvf — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 20:12:19 +0000

With my frequent collaborator, Thony Gillies, I am working on the fourth article in our trilogy on epistemic modality. The previous installments are, of course:

The fourth one is called “Must … Stay … Strong!” and attacks the persistent myth or mantra that must p is a weaker claim that plain p. We have started taking the material on the road, but there’s plenty of work to be done. For now, there are an evolving slideshow for various presentations and a handout based on the slides. As always, we’d appreciate any comments, criticism, and feedback.

[Update (5/21/08): A full draft of the "Must ... Stay ... Strong!" paper is now available.]

‘Might’ Made Right, At Last

kvf — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 20:47:55 +0000

Thony Gillies and I have finally finished the overdue draft of our indeterminacy proposal about the semantics and pragmatics of the epistemic modal might: “Might Made Right”. Check it out and please give us feedback. We’re told the very final version is needed towards the end of the fall.

Universals in Semantics

kvf — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 20:47:03 +0000

There is a special issue of The Linguistic Review in the works, with a set of invited papers on the topic of universals from the perspective of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Lisa Matthewson and I just finished the manuscript of the semantics article:

Kai von Fintel & Lisa Matthewson. 2007. “Universals in Semantics”. ms, to appear in a special issue of The Linguistic Review devoted to universals.

We found that there hadn’t been a survey of universals in semantics in a formal/theoretical vein and so we decided to fill the gap, at least temporarily until some burning soul takes on the task. The manuscript is 64 pages long, including 16 pages of bibliography.

The article is now going off to be reviewed, but we would like to enlist the help of semanticists everywhere to take a look at the manuscript and help us. So, let us know if there are any errors, if we forgot to mention something (although at this point and this length, we’ll probably only be able to add a footnote here and there), or anything else you would like us to think about. Cheers!

[Update: The article has been updated and revised based on peer review. This is now the final version, as it will appear in The Linguistic Review.]

[Update: The article has now appeared.]

Paper Title for Dummies (and My Thesis)

kvf — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 16:42:48 +0000

Two quick notes:

The paper that Thony Gillies and I wrote for the second volume of the Oxford Studies in Epistemology has a new title. It used to be called “Epistemic Modality for Dummies”. But under pressure from the editors, reviewers, and publishers, we have agreed to call it “An Opinionated Guide to Epistemic Modality”. We could have considered “The Paper Formerly Known As ‘Epistemic Modality for Dummies’” or we could have chosen a glyph, but caution won out.
I was finally able to wrestle M$ Word to the ground and made a serviceable pdf-file of my 1994 PhD thesis. It is now available from the semanticsarchive. My resolve of never again letting some software company hold my personal data hostage has been reinforced by this very painful process. Anyway, now the thesis is freely available.