Welcome to the website for Semantics II (Spring 2018). Below is an up-to-date overview of our schedule, with links to notes from class where applicable. The readings can be found, naturally, under the Readings tab (you’ll need to use the provided password to access them).

Meetings Topic Overview of readings Notes

Week 1–2

Abstraction & binding
  • Heim & Kratzer (1998: Ch. 5)

Week 3–4

Intensionality
  • von Fintel & Heim (2011: Ch. 1–4)
  • von Fintel & Gillies (2007)

Week 5–6

Events, tense & aspect
  • Parsons (1990: Ch. 1–3)
  • Champollion (2011), (2015)
  • Kratzer (1996), (1998)
  • Hacquard (2010)
  • Szabó (2004)

Week 7–8

Questions & indefinites
  • Krifka (2011), Heim (2011)
  • Groenendijk & Stokhof (1989)
  • Reinhart (1997)
  • Dayal (1994), (2002)

Week 9–10

Dynamic semantics
  • Heim (1983), Dekker (1994)
  • Gamut (1991: Ch. 7.4)
  • Groenendijk & Stokhof (1991)
  • Szabolcsi (2003)

Week 11–12

Type-shifts, scope & binding
  • Partee (1986)
  • Szabolcsi (2011)
  • Jacobson (1994), Charlow (2017)
  • Barker & Shan (2008)

Week 13–14

(Scalar) implicature
  • Sauerland (2004)
  • Chierchia, Fox & Spector (2012)
  • Potts et al. (2016)

References

Barker, Chris & Chung-chieh Shan. 2008. Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding. Semantics and Pragmatics 1(1). 1–46. https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.1.1.

Champollion, Lucas. 2011. Quantification and negation in event semantics. In, Formal semantics and pragmatics: Discourse, context, and models, vol. 6, 1–23. (The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication). New Prairie Press. https://doi.org/10.4148/biyclc.v6i0.1563.

Champollion, Lucas. 2015. The interaction of compositional semantics and event semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 38(1). Springer Netherlands. 31–66. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-014-9162-8.

Charlow, Simon. 2017. A modular theory of pronouns and binding. In, Proceedings of Logic and Engineering of Natural Language Semantics 14.

Chierchia, Gennaro, Danny Fox & Benjamin Spector. 2012. Scalar implicature as a grammatical phenomenon. In Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, vol. 3, 2297–2331. (HSK 33). Berlin: de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110253382.2297.

Dayal, Veneeta. 1994. Scope marking as indirect wh-dependency. Natural Language Semantics 2(2). Kluwer Academic Publishers. 137–170. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01250401.

Dayal, Veneeta. 2002. Single-pair versus multiple-pair answers: Wh-in-situ and scope. Linguistic Inquiry 33(3). MIT Press. 512–520. https://doi.org/10.1162/ling.2002.33.3.512.

Dekker, Paul. 1994. Predicate logic with anaphora. In Mandy Harvey & Lynn Santelmann (eds.), Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 4, 79–95. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v4i0.2459.

Fintel, Kai von & Anthony S. Gillies. 2007. An opinionated guide to epistemic modality. In Tamar Szabo Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford studies in epistemology, vol. 2, 32–62. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fintel, Kai von & Irene Heim. 2011. Intensional semantics, Spring 2011 edition. ms.

Gamut, L. T. F. 1991. Intensional logic and logical grammar. Vol. 2. (Logic, Language, and Meaning). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Groenendijk, Jeroen & Martin Stokhof. 1989. Type-shifting rules and the semantics of interrogatives. In Gennaro Chierchia, Barbara H. Partee & Raymond Turner (eds.), Properties, types and meaning: Volume II: Semantic issues, 21–68. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2723-0_2.

Groenendijk, Jeroen & Martin Stokhof. 1991. Dynamic predicate logic. Linguistics and Philosophy 14(1). Kluwer Academic Publishers. 39–100. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00628304.

Hacquard, Valentine. 2010. On the event relativity of modal auxiliaries. Natural Language Semantics 18(1). 79–114. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11050-010-9056-4.

Heim, Irene. 1983. File change semantic and the familiarity theory of definiteness. In Rainer Bäuerle, Christoph Schwarze & Arnim von Stechow (eds.), Meaning, use and interpretation of language, 164–190. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110852820.164.

Heim, Irene. 2011. Compositional semantics of questions and wh-movement. ms.

Heim, Irene & Angelika Kratzer. 1998. Semantics in generative grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.

Jacobson, Pauline. 1994. I-within-i effects in a variable-free semantics and a categorial syntax. In Paul Dekker & Martin Stokhof (eds.), Proceedings of the Ninth Amsterdam Colloquium, 349–369. University of Amsterdam.

Kratzer, Angelika. 1996. Severing the external argument from its verb. In Johan Rooryck & Laurie Zaring (eds.), Phrase structure and the lexicon, 109–137. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8617-7_5.

Kratzer, Angelika. 1998. More structural analogies between pronouns and tenses. In Devon Strolovitch & Aaron Lawson (eds.), Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistic Theory 8, 92–110. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. https://doi.org/10.3765/salt.v8i0.2808.

Krifka, Manfred. 2011. Questions. In Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, vol. 2, 1742–1785. (HSK 33). Berlin: de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110255072.1742.

Parsons, Terence. 1990. Events in the semantics of English. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Partee, Barbara H. 1986. Noun phrase interpretation and type-shifting principles. In Jeroen Groenendijk, Dick de Jongh & Martin Stokhof (eds.), Studies in Discourse Representation Theory and the Theory of Generalized Quantifiers, 115–143. Dordrecht: Foris.

Potts, Christopher, Daniel Lassiter, Roger Levy & Michael C. Frank. 2016. Embedded implicatures as pragmatic inferences under compositional lexical uncertainty. Journal of Semantics 33(4). 755–802. https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffv012.

Reinhart, Tanya. 1997. Quantifier scope: How labor is divided between QR and choice functions. Linguistics and Philosophy 20(4). 335–397. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1005349801431.

Sauerland, Uli. 2004. Scalar implicatures in complex sentences. Linguistics and Philosophy 27(3). Kluwer Academic Publishers. 367–391. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:LING.0000023378.71748.db.

Szabolcsi, Anna. 2003. Binding on the fly: Cross-sentential anaphora in variable-free semantics. In Geert-Jan M. Kruijff & Richard T. Oehrle (eds.), Resource-sensitivity, binding and anaphora, 215–227. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0037-6_8.

Szabolcsi, Anna. 2011. Scope and binding. In Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of natural language meaning, vol. 2, 1605–1641. (HSK 33). Berlin: de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110255072.1605.

Szabó, Zoltán Gendler. 2004. On the progressive and the perfective. Noûs 38(1). Blackwell. 29–59. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2004.00461.x.