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The Anaphoric Theory of Tense
The Anaphoric Theory of Tense James Higginbotham University of Southern California In this article I extend the discussion of Sequence of Tense phenomena in English that I have presented in earlier work (particularly Higginbotham 2002a and 1995) so as to include some properties of the English Perfect, and so as to clarify some pieces of the construction that I left open or unarticulated there. I also call attention to some features of what I call here indexical mismatch as between adverbials and tenses, a phenomenon that may well extend in a number of directions, both within individual languages and cross-linguistically. In large part, however, my purpose here is critical: I aim to show, despite arguments to the contrary, that anaphoric theories of tense do exactly what needs to be done to explain the dependencies of c-commanded tenses upon c-commanding ones, and that alternatives, notably those of the sort proposed in Ogihara (1995), von Stechow (1995) and Abusch (1994) and (1997), must build back into their respective accounts the anaphoric properties of Sequence of Tense if those accounts are to be part of an empirically adequate system. The semantics that I deploy here will require abandonment, or at least radical modification, of any framework that takes sentential complements in a “notation-free” manner, as in possible-worlds semantics; but that framework wants modification anyway, or so (for familiar reasons) I will assume. 1. Introduction Anaphoric theories of tense may be elaborated in several ways. As I am using the term, an anaphoric theory will account for the familiar properties of a sentence such as English (1.1) by establishing some basis for coreference between the Tense-bearing element of the main clause (in this case futurate will), and that of the complement clause (here the Present, or –Past, inflection on the copula): (1.1) John will say that Mary is happy. -
A Bibliography on Event Semantics and Related Matters
A Bibliography on Event Semantics and Related Matters Events: Modification, Aspect and Lexical Meaning Cleo Condoravdi and Hana Filip LSA Institute Stanford July, 2007 References [1] Abusch, Dorit. 1985. On Verbs and Time. Doctoral dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. [2] Abusch, Dorit. 1986. Verbs of Change, Causation, and Time. Technical Report CSLI-86-50, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. [3] Abusch, Dorit. 2005. Causatives and Mixed Aspectual Type. In Gregory N. Carlson and Francis J. Pelletier, eds., 29–61. [4] Abusch, Dorit and Mats Rooth. 1990. Temporal Adverbs and the English Perfect. NELS 20, 1–15. [5] Alexiadou Artemis, Monika Rathert and Arnim von Stechow (eds.). 2003. Perfect Explorations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [6] Allen, James. 1983. Maintaining Knowledge about Temporal Intervals. CACM 26, 832–843. [7] Allen, James. 1984. Towards a General Theory of Action and Time. Arti- ficial Intelligence 23, 123–154. [8] Arregui, Ana. To appear. When aspect matters: the case of would- conditionals. Natural Language Semantics. [9] Artstein, Ron. 2006. Quantificational Arguments in Temporal Adjunct Clauses. Linguistics and Philosophy 28, 541–597. 1 [10] Asher, Nicholas. 1992. A Default, Truth Conditional Semantics for the Progressive. Linguistics and Philosophy 15, 463–508. [11] Asher, Nicholas. 1993. Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse. Dor- drecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. [12] Asher, Nicholas and Pierre Sablayrolles. 1995. A Typology and Discourse Semantics for Motion verbs and Spatial PPs in French. Journal of Seman- tics 12, 163–209. [13] Bach, Emmon. 1981. On Time, Tense, and Aspect: An Essay in English Metaphysics. In Peter Cole, ed., Radical Pragmatics, 63–81. -
Curriculum Vitae
CURRICULUM VITAE Robert C. May Department of Philosophy (530) 554-9554 (office) University of California [email protected] Davis, CA 95616 Degrees Swarthmore College; B.A. with High Honors, 1973. • Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy; Ph.D., 1977. • Faculty Positions Assistant Professor of Linguistics. Barnard College and The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, • Columbia University. 1981 - 1986. Associate Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences. University of California, Irvine. 1986 - 1989. • Professor of Linguistics. University of California, Irvine. 1989 - 1997 • Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy, University of California, Irvine. 1997 - 2001. • Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science, Linguistics and Philosophy, University of California, • Irvine, 2001 - 2006. Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics, University of California, Davis, 2006 - 2012 • Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics, University of California, Davis. 2012 - present. • Other Academic Positions Post-doctoral research fellow. Laboratory of Experimental Psychology. The Rockefeller University.1977 • -1979. Research Stipendiate. Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik. Nijmegen, The Netherlands. 1979, • 1980. Post-doctoral research fellow. Center for Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, • 1980 -1981. Visiting Lecturer. Graduate School of Languages and Linguistics. Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan. • 1983. Visiting Research Scholar. The Graduate Center, City University of New York. 1985 - 1986. • Fulbright Distinguished Professor. University of Venice. 1994. • Visiting Scholar. Department of Philosophy. Columbia University. 2013, 2014 - 15. • Visiting Professor, Ecole Normale Superieure and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. 2014. • 1 Professional Positions and Activities Director. Syntax and Semantics Workshop: Logical Form and Its Semantic Interpretation. 1985 - • 1987. Editor. The Linguistic Review Dissertation Abstracts. 1984 - 1988. • Associate Editorial Board. -
GEOFFREY B. GEORGI USC School of Philosophy 430 N
GEOFFREY B. GEORGI USC School of Philosophy 430 N. Holliston Ave. #202 Mudd Hall of Philosophy Pasadena, CA 91106 3709 Trousdale Parkway m: 626-354-2742 Los Angeles, CA 90089 [email protected] f: 213-740-5174 www-scf.usc.edu/~ggeorgi EDUCATION Ph.D., Philosophy, University of Southern California (USC) School of Philosophy, August 2011 Dissertation Title: Demonstratives in Logic and Natural Language Dissertation Advisor: Scott Soames Ph.D. Candidate, Philosophy, University of California (UC), Davis, 2001 – 2004 M.A., Philosophy, Tufts University, June 2001 Honors B.A., Celtic Studies & Literary Studies, University of Toronto, June 1997 AREAS OF RESEARCH SPECIALIZATION AND TEACHING COMPETENCE Areas of Specialization: Philosophy of Language, Philosophical Logic Areas of Competence: Logic, Metaphysics and Epistemology, History of Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Ancient Philosophy FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS USC Summer Dissertation Award, Summer 2008, Summer 2009 USC School of Philosophy Flewelling Summer Research Award, Summer 2006 UC Davis Summer Research Award, Summer 2002 University of California Eugene Cota-Robles Fellow, 2001 – 2003 PUBLICATIONS “Reference and Ambiguity in Complex Demonstratives,” to appear in Reference and Referring: Topics in Contemporary Philosophy, v. 10, ed. Campbell, J. K., Kabasenche, W., and O'Rourke, M. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS “Logical Truth and Consequence in the Logic of Demonstratives,” Arché Conference on Foundations of Logical Consequence, June 2010 “Demonstratives and Pragmatic -
Collections and Paradox
Collections and Paradox Remko Scha Institute for Logic, Language and Computation [email protected] 1 Preface This essay is dedicated to Jeroen Groenendijk, Martin Stokhof, and Frank Veltman — but not to each of them separately, but to all of them jointly, as a group, or a set, or a mereological sum. This group was an important part of a community of logicians and philosophers at the University of Amsterdam, that had a stimulating influence on my first ventures into formal semantics in the course of the 1970’s. The discussion below ties in directly with that work. My topic will be the conceptual viability of the very idea of ”collective entities” such as “Frank, Martin and Jeroen” and “the Amsterdam Montagovians.” Most theories of formal semantics assume that such plural noun phrases denote higher-level entities of some sort, that have individuals (such as Frank, Jeroen and Martin) as their members or parts. But this assumption has been challenged. A sweeping argument against ”collections” of any kind was raised in the eighties and nineties by George Boolos, James Higginbotham and Barry Schein [4, 5, 8, 27]: collections engender paradox. The chapters on plurals in some fairly recent handbooks in the Philosophy of Language [28, 15] still discuss this argument at great length, treating it as one of the most important issues in the field. Nonetheless, most researchers in this area seemed not at all disturbed by this challenge, and did not feel the need to deal with it. Fred Landman [11] for instance, in the context of an otherwise detailed discussion of Schein’s proposals about plurals, shrugs it o↵with a deadpan witticism: “Schein 1993 invokes an argument for his approach involving Russell’s paradox. -
Three Grades of Instrumentalism Russell Marcus, Ph.D. Chauncey
Three Grades of Instrumentalism Russell Marcus, Ph.D. Chauncey Truax Post-Doctoral Fellow Department of Philosophy, Hamilton College 198 College Hill Road Clinton NY 13323 [email protected] (315) 859-4056 (office) (315) 381-3125 (home) (917) 903-7483 (mobile) January 2008 5602 words Abstract: I defend a view, mathematical instrumentalism, on which quantification over mathematical objects in scientific theory does not entail commitment to their existence. I present a puzzle about the status of our beliefs in mathematical objects, and show how instrumentalism resolves it. MI undermines both the indispensability argument and the primary response to it which demands reformulations of scientific theory to avoid mathematical commitments. Three Grades of Instrumentalism, 1 §1. Posits and Homogeny You look skyward on a clear night and say, “There are stars.” We conclude that you believe that there are stars. You study atomic theory and say, “There are atoms.” We conclude that you believe that atoms exist. You study quantum physics and say, “There are Hilbert spaces.” We conclude that you believe that there are abstract structures called Hilbert spaces.1 These three inferences are supported by Quine’s dictum that to be is to be the value of a variable, which connects ontic commitment with quantification. In contrast, I wish to urge that the third inference, unlike the first two, is invalid. I do not deny that there are Hilbert spaces. Nor do I deny that quantum mechanics refers to Hilbert spaces. My claim, in this paper, is merely that the inference from the sentences of quantum mechanics to the existence of mathematical objects is unjustified. -
Influences on Ziff's Views About Semantics Ordinary Language Philosophy Especially As Practiced by JL Austin
Influences on Ziff's Views about Semantics Ordinary language philosophy especially as practiced by J. L. Austin "A Plea for Excuses" "Three Ways of Spilling Ink" Linguistics De Saussure's Structuralism Chomsky's generative grammar These approaches are hard to combine Among my encounters with Paul Ziff He came to one or more philosophy talks at Swarthmore probably 1959-60 I remember him objecting to Philippa Foot, that she could not account for a broken knife The era of philosophical gun fighting Experiencing this at Princeton Paul Benacerraf Robert Nozick Relevant background of mine I learned about linguistics and Chomsky at a course taught by Henry Hiz at Penn, summer 1959. As a graduate student at Harvard Philosophy (and expecially MIT Linguistics) 1960-63 I studied with great care Ziff's Semantic Analysis I studied with Chomsky I had a part-time job in Victor Yngve's Mechanical Translation Lab My first publications argued that a generative grammar did not need transformation rules and could use only phrase structure rules Benacerraf led a seminar on Ziff's book at Princeton before I arrived Benacerraf and I discussed Ziff's book after I arrived. We taught a seminar together in philosophy of language I taught a course in generative grammar And have been trying to get a linguistics department at Princeton ever since Ziff published a paper in Foundations of Language, "About What an Adequate Grammar Could Not Do" This was the first article in the first issue, published in 1965 I wrote a response, "About What an Adequate Grammar Could Do" In an official Princeton Department of Philosophy photograph, Donald Davidson is joyfully showing me an issue of Foundations of Language that had just arrived containing Paul Ziff's rejoinder "Some Comments on Mr. -
Truth and Meaning—In Perspective
March 2008 March 2008 Truth and Meaning – In Perspective by Scott Soames School of Philosophy University of Southern California To Appear In Truth and Its Deformities Edited by Peter French Midwest Studies in Philosophy Volume XXXII 2008 Truth and Meaning – In Perspective Scott Soames My topic is the attempt by Donald Davidson, and those inspired by him, to explain knowledge of meaning in terms of knowledge of truth conditions. For Davidsonians, these attempts take the form of rationales for treating theories of truth, constructed along Tarskian lines, as empirical theories of meaning. In earlier work1, I argued that Davidson’s two main rationales – one presented in “Truth and Meaning”2 and “Radical Interpretation,”3 and the other in his “Reply to Foster”4 – were unsuccessful. Here, I extend my critique to cover an ingenious recent attempt by James Higginbotham to establish Davidson’s desired result. I will argue that it, too, fails, and that the trajectory of Davidsonian failures indicates that linguistic understanding, and knowledge of meaning, require more than knowledge of that which a Davidsonian truth theory provides. I begin with a look at the historical record. The Evolution of an Idea: A Historical Summary When Davidson enunciated his idea, in the 1960s, that theories of meaning can be taken to be nothing more than theories of truth, it met with a warm reception. For devotees of Ordinary Language, its attraction lay in its promise of providing a theoretically respectable way of grounding claims about meaning, and distinguishing them from claims about use, that those who still placed meaning at the center of philosophy had come to recognize the need for.5 For 1 Scott Soames, “Truth, Meaning, and Understanding,” Philosophical Studies, 65, 1992; 17-35, and chapter 12 of Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 2003. -
Oxford University Working Papers, in Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics
Oxford University Working Papers, in Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics VOLUME 6 May 2001 Edited by Maria Liakata Britta Jensen Didier Maillat Editorial assistant Joanna Levene Contents Page Editorial Note iii Complex Aspectual Structure in Hindi/Urdu 1 MIRIAM BUTT & GILLIAN RAMCHAND Grammar learning using Inductive Logic Programming 31 JAMES CUSSENS & STEPHEN PULMAN Two strategies to construct Telicity: A comparative analysis of 47 English and Italian RAFFAELLA FOLLI Why is Sequence of Tense obligatory? 67 JAMES HIGGINBOTHAM On the Information-Structural effects of Scrambling in German 91 CAROLIN HOYER On sentential negation in the Mainland Scandinavian languages 115 BRITTA JENSEN How to resolve Pronouns combining syntactic information and 137 an induced domain theory MARIA LIAKATA Which template for behind? Empirical considerations 151 of the meaning of Directional PPs DIDIER MAILLAT A Minimalist Approach to Quantifiers 167 HISASHI MORITA Syntactic Ergativity in Tongan 189 YUKO OTSUKA iii Editorial note Oxford Working Papers in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics presents research being undertaken by past and present staff and graduate students from the University of Oxford. The current volume concentrates on topics in Syntax and Semantics, with two papers from the field of Computational Linguistics. Comments on the work included here are welcome: the authors’ addresses are provided at the end of each paper. To get in touch with the editors or for further information you can write to: The Centre for Linguistics & Philology Clarendon -
Activities, Accomplishments and Causation
Activities, Accomplishments and Causation Rainer Osswald Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf 1. Introduction The Aktionsart system and its representation by means of logical structures is one of the corner- stones of the syntax-semantics interface of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG). The logical structures are a core component of the semantic representation of a sentence, and the positions of the arguments in these structures play a crucial role for the realization of the arguments in the syntax as determined by the linking system. The system of Aktionsart classes, as well as the system of logical structures in general, has evolved considerably over the years since the publication of Foley and Van Valin (1984), which was largely based on Dowty’s (1979/1991) adaption of ideas from Generative Semantics. The present paper has a two-fold objective: First, we will take a look at the issues of Dowty’s proposal, many of which have been pointed out by Dowty himself, and show how they have been addressed by the various modifications of the decomposition system of RRG. This includes, among other things, the independence of causation from telicity as a consequence of introducing active accomplishments, and the more recent decomposition of (simple) accomplishments into a process and a result component. The second objective of the paper is to address issues of the current decomposition system and to suggest possible ways of how to overcome them. In particular, it will prove useful to clarify the denotational meaning of the logical structures, that is, to spell out the reference to states and events more explicitly. -
Issues in the Philosophical Foundations of Lexical Semantics
Issues in the Philosophical Foundations of Lexical Semantics by Brian Edward Ulicny B.A. Philosophy, B.S. Electrical Engineering, University of Notre Dame (1986) Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy at the MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY May 1993 © Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1993. All rights reserved. Author ................ ......... ................................. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy April 20, 1993 Certified by... ........ .... ........... ................. .......... James Higginbotham Professor, Linguistics and Philosophy Thesis Supervisor A ccepted by ................................. George Boolos Chairman, Departmental Committee on Graduate Studies ARCHIVES MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TFCHNOLOGY ¶JUN 03 1993 Issues in the Philosophical Foundations of Lexical Semantics by Brian Edward Ulicny Submitted to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy on April 20, 1993, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Abstract My dissertation defends and explores the thesis that in order for a speaker to un- derstand a natural language it is not only sufficient but necessary that the speaker tacitly know or "cognize" the truth-conditional contribution of the words and other sentential elements to the truth-conditions of the whole expression. A speaker's se- mantic competence is to be explained as the employment of an internally-represented axiomatized truth theory for that speaker's first language. By providing a theory of truth for a language, the truth of certain sentences follows on the basis of that theory alone. In the first chapter, I develop and defend a notion of analyticity suggested by Noam Chomsky in his Language and Problems of Knowledge (1986) against skeptical worries due to Quine and Burge. -
DAVIDSON's PROGRAM and INTERPRETED LOGICAL FORMS the “Interpreted Logical Form” (ILF) Analysis of Attitude Ascriptions
LENNY CLAPP DAVIDSON’S PROGRAM AND INTERPRETED LOGICAL FORMS 1. INTRODUCTION The “Interpreted Logical Form” (ILF) analysis of attitude ascriptions has been proffered, most notably by Higginbotham (1986) and Larson and Ludlow (1993), as a means of resolving within the framework of Davidson’s semantic program the familiar problems posed by attitude ascriptions.1 In this paper I argue that only an analysis of attitude ascrip- tions along the lines of Davidson’s (1968) “paratactic” analysis can resolve the problem posed by attitude ascriptions within the constraints of Dav- idson’s semantic program. The ILF analyses, though following Davidson in providing recursive formal theories that entail statements of the truth conditions of sentences, violate theoretical constraints that Davidson takes pains to satisfy. That the ILF analyses violate these constraints raises two theoretical questions: First, do the ILF analyses nonetheless adequately perform what Davidson calls the “central task of a theory of meaning”, viz. explain- ing how “speakers of a language can effectively determine the meaning or meanings of an arbitrary expression” (Davidson, 1967)? Or does this violation serve to undermine their plausibility as explanations of our se- mantic competence? I will argue that because the ILF analyses violate the theoretical constraints of Davidson’s semantic program their plausibility as explanations of our semantic competence is significantly undermined. I am grateful to Mark Richard, Robert Stainton, Irene Heim, Brian Ulicny, Paul Piet- roski, Andrew Botterell, James Higginbotham, Jason Stanley, Zoltan Szabo, Peter Ludlow, and several anonymous referees for helpful discussion and comments. 1 Versions of Higginbotham’s proposal are endorsed by Segal (1989) and Pietrosky (1994).