A workshop on Logic, Linguistics and Artifical Intelligence will be held in the East Conference Room in the Rackham Building on Friday, Nov. 6 and Sat., Nov. 7 in honor of Rich Thomason.
Speakers include: Charles Cross, Bas van Fraasen, Alex Lascarides, Leora Morgenstern, Barbara Partee, Robert Stalnaker, Matthew Stone and Frank Veltman.
Ezra Keshet has received a grant from the LSAIT committee to create the Online Semantic Calculator, which will help students learn semantic analysis techniques.
The conference, Discourse Constraints on Anaphora, organized by Ezra Keshet (Department of Linguistics) and Eric Swanson (Department of Philosophy) will take place at the University of Michigan April 6-7.
Details on the conference, including a schedule and registration information, are available at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ericsw/anaphora/. Below is the conference description from the website:
Much recent work in linguistics, philosophy of language, cognitive psychology and computer science focuses on questions about anaphora and discourse. However, some major questions about the structure of discourse and its interaction with anaphors remain unanswered. To this end, the majority of the Discourse Constraints on Anaphora Conference will consist of roundtable discussions of the following four questions:
The resulting conversations, between scholars with a diverse range of approaches, will serve as a snapshots of current thought on anaphora and discourse. We hope that they will also mark the next step towards answering these questions. Roundtable participants include Barbara Abbott, Alan Garnham, Hans Kamp, Craige Roberts, Hannah Rohde, Jason Stanley, and Matthew Stone.
We are delighted to welcome Ezra Keshet to the Linguistics Department as a new Assistant Professor in Semantics beginning in Fall 2009. Ezra completed his PhD in semantics at MIT and has been a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department this year. Ezra’s work focuses on syntax, pragmatics and discourse.
His dissertation argues that possible worlds and times must be explicitly represented in the syntax of natural language and explains several constraints such representations must obey. He has also done research on scalar implicature, showing that an analysis involving alternative semantics solves several puzzles relating to the topic; and telescoping, including arguments that syntactic rules sometimes bridge multiple sentences, given the proper discourse environment.
Other interests of Ezra’s include singing, cooking, and computational linguistics.
The annual University of Michigan Workshop in Philosophy and Linguistics will be held Nov. 21-23. This year’s topic is implicature.
Friday sessions (which begin at 4 pm) will be held in 2271 Angell Hall
Saturday and Sunday sessions will be held in Conference D Room of the Michigan League
Ezra Keshet gave the colloquium talk on Friday, Nov. 14 for Wayne State’s Colloquium series. The talk was entitled: Split Intensionality: A New Theory of De re/De dicto Distinction.
Abstract
The traditional scope theory of intensionality (STI) is inadequate, as evidenced by the scope paradoxes discussed in Fodor (1970), Bauerle (1983), and Percus (2000). For instance, the STI predicts (1) to mean something like “each democrat is such that if s/he were a republican, there would be only one political party” — clearly the wrong meaning for this sentence.
(1) If every democrat were a republican, there would only be one political party.
This talk will therefore propose a replacement for the STI, called split intensionality. Compared to an earlier replacement for the STI, the situation pronoun theory, split intensionality represents a more modest departure. The split intensionality system separates each intensional operator’s quantificational force from its intensional force, by use of a new operator, ^ (after Montague 1970). This move proves enough to solve the problems of the STI without overgenerating — as the situation pronoun theory does. In particular, the talk will focus on new data involving island constraints and negative polarity items that supports the split intensionality system over the situation pronoun system.
Ezra Keshet joins us as visiting Assistant Professor in 2008-09, holding the Language Learning visiting faculty position. Ezra completed his PhD in semantics at MIT, and his work touches on syntax, pragmatics and discourse.
His dissertation argues that possible worlds and times must be explicitly represented in the syntax of natural language and explains several constraints such representations must obey. He has also done research on scalar implicature, showing that an analysis involving alternative semantics solves several puzzles relating to the topic; and telescoping, including arguments that syntactic rules sometimes bridge multiple sentences, given the proper discourse environment.
Other interests of Ezra’s include singing, cooking, and computational linguistics.
Welcome, Ezra!
Ezra Keshet will be our visiting Assistant Professor in 2008-09, holding the Language Learning visiting faculty position. Ezra will teach two of our semantics courses in 2008-09. He is current completing his PhD in semantics at MIT, but his work also touches on syntax, pragmatics and discourse.
His dissertation argues that possible worlds and times must be explicitly represented in the syntax of natural language and explains several constraints such representations must obey. He has also done research on scalar implicature, showing that an analysis involving alternative semantics solves several puzzles relating to the topic; and telescoping, including arguments that syntactic rules sometimes bridge multiple sentences, given the proper discourse environment.
Other interests of Ezra’s include singing, cooking, and computational linguistics.
Welcome, Ezra!
