Students and faculty represented five insitutions: University of Chicago, University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Michigan State University and The Ohio State University. Next year, we at Michigan will be hosting the workshop in Ann Arbor.

Description of the talks.

Speakers include: Charles Cross, Bas van Fraasen, Alex Lascarides, Leora Morgenstern, Barbara Partee, Robert Stalnaker, Matthew Stone and Frank Veltman.

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:

• What is the structure of discourse?
• How does the structure of discourse constrain the referents of pronouns?
• What do discourse constraints on anaphora teach us about reference?
• What do discourse constraints on anaphora teach us about the structure of the mind?

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.

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

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.

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!