Sabine took this while I was chairing the semantics session at Ling50@MIT, where Danny and Philippe were the speakers:

John Frampton has posted a new version of ExPex, his example package to end all example packages for TeX and LaTeX: http://www.math.neu.edu/ling/tex/expex/. He intends to upload the package to CTAN in the near future. I might finally switch away from linguex.

The slides from Lisa Matthewson’s talk at NELS 42, “How (not) to uncover cross-linguistic variation” are online. I can’t wait to read the paper. This is an important reply to overblown claims about linguistic variation.

During my sabbatical year, I have just as many races projected as I have speaking gigs. Perhaps, I should make that a principle.

I plan to run the following races:

• October 9, 2011: BAA Half Marathon
• April 1, 2012: Cohasset Road Race by the Sea 10K
• April 15, 2012: BAA 5K
• June 3, 2012: The Old Sandwich Road Race Half-Marathon
• June 24, 2012: BAA 10K
• October 7, 2012: BAA Half-Marathon

Here’s a list of my speaking engagements:

• October 7, 2011: Colloquium talk at the University of Connecticut
• February 7, 2012: Invited talk at Yale (Current Work in Cognitive Science)
• February 16-20, 2012: Invited talk in a session on “Deontic Modals” at the APA Central Division meeting in Chicago
• April 19-21, 2012: Invited speaker at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society
• Spring 2012, some time: Invited talk to the Philosophy Faculty at Oxford University’s Jowett Society

After three weeks of sabbatical, I feel my mind slowly becoming less full of clutter and I may be ready to tackle some substantial projects (outlined below). In the mean time:

• There was a lot of high quality soccer this month (almost all of it at the Women’s World Cup, which was simply fantastic, and almost none of it was at the Copa America, a disappointing showing from teams like Argentina and Brazil).
• I have started training for the BAA Half Marathon on October 9. I’m running just about 20 miles a week with a long weekend run of 7 miles and soon more. Unless the weather is too muggy, this feels good.
• Lion arrived last week and I am happily using it on my laptop and my soon take the plunge on my big computer as well, since it’s weird to switch between operating systems. The new TeXShop for Lion is especially impressive.
• I wrote two Language Log posts: one on the meaning of “any” according to the Supreme Court and one on the difference between “smelly” and “tasty”.
• I have started posting some short stuff to Google+, instead of Facebook or shorter posts on this blog. You’re welcome to join me there.
• S&P is chugging along nicely. We’re just about to publish our fourth paper this year and have many fascinating articles in the pipeline. We hope that all of you are considering us seriously as the venue for the fruits of your summer work. We think there is no better journal in our field. Also: if you have something to say about any of the articles we publish, consider submitting a short commentary, for which we offer expedited editorial review.

On my plate for the next few weeks:

• Finally finishing a handbook article about “subjunctive conditionals” (whatever that means) for the Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language edited by Delia Graff Fara and Gillian Russell, who have been suffering from my tardiness way too long.
• Thony and I (among many other projects) need to write a handbook article on deontic modality in natural language, in the course of which I would like to better understand the recent work on the miners’ puzzle.
• Sabine and I (among many other projects) want to figure out how it happens that imperatives are used in so-called IaDs (“Make one false move and I’ll kill you!”). We have lots of cross-linguistic observations and plenty of difficulties for existing theories, and so it would be nice to tie it all together in a positive account.
• Starting work on a book about the semantics of conditionals …, which is the big project for this year.

Early this fall, I’m visiting Cornell University and the University of Connecticut for colloquium talks, and I’m trying to see whether I can give two talks (on deontics and on IaDs) in both places. The next few weeks will tell.

As announced on the Google Scholar Blog yesterday, there is now the option of creating a researcher profile of yourself. Google’s documentation of this service (“Google Scholar Citations”) is here.

Google Scholar Citations is currently in limited launch with a small number of users. This is a new direction for us and we plan to use the experience and feedback from the limited launch to improve the service. Click here and follow the instructions to get started. Keep in mind that this is a limited launch and we may not be able to accept new users when you click. If this happens, we’ll direct you to a sign-up page where you can register to be notified when Google Scholar Citations is available to all users.

I have worked a bit on my profile, correcting some typos (like the spelling of my name … sigh). NB: “If you have substantially changed the bibliographic record (title, authors, journal, etc.), we may not able to match it up with Google Scholar’s index right away. If so, it may take a few days for your citation metrics to include the updated article.” That’s a bit scary so I haven’t gone all out updating the bibliographic details, but I might try it on a test case.

In 2003, Thony and I spent many a pleasant afternoon at Burdick’s in Harvard Square doing socially acceptable drugs and brainstorming about the recent spate of work on epistemic modality. Several talks and papers issued out of those conservations, which continued in virtual space when Thony left Cambridge. We had quite a few didactic, critical, and iconoclastic things to say, which have been fairly well received. But our positive account of some of the pragmatic puzzles surrounding epistemic modals took a looooooong time to see the light of official publication. Now it’s here, eight years after conception:

von Fintel, Kai & Anthony S. Gillies. 2011. Might made right. In Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic modality, 108–130. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Offprint: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-gillies-2011-mmr.pdf.

According to Google Scholar, MMR (as we call it) has received 35 citations so far based on electronic distribution of drafts and preprints. It’ll be interesting to see whether the final dead tree publication has any appreciable impact.

As hinted yesterday, I have joined the Language Log juggernaut (thanks to Mark Liberman and Geoff Pullum for recruiting me). Here’s my first post: Justice Breyer, Professor Austin, and the Meaning of ‘Any’.

As of July 1, 2011, I’m on leave from MIT for one year, a combination of an overdue sabbatical and an administrative leave at the end of a three and a half year term as Associate Dean (a position to which I will return for another tour of duty after my leave). As the canvas of a full year devoted to research and writing opens in front of me, I very much hope and intend to take good advantage of it. This means both getting oodles of work done and recuperating in a way that’s unadulterated by constantly checking email and worrying and tracking work to-dos. That’s not easy for me, but I will try my best and may chronicle my experience here.

Already over the last few days (which of course was primarily the long 4th of July weekend), structured procrastination has done its magic and so quite a few home chores got done and also some of the backlog at S&P has been reduced. Soon, I will have to turn to some seriously overdue papers and then start taking nibbles at the big project, more about which in due time.

One obstacle to optimal productivity (or perhaps, a legitimate part of optimal recuperation) is the surfeit of high quality football and more football going on right now.

Also, I suspect that there will be quite a bit of blogging both here and there, and in late-breaking news soon over there.

We have rebooted the S&P Editors’ Blog and there are two new posts about associate editors and about lumpiness.