G61.2370 Semantics II
Prof. Anna Szabolcsi
Spring 2006
Monday 2:00—5:00
Issues of the syntax/semantics interface are in the center of this course, espcially, the division of labor between syntax and semantics. We ask whether the generalizations and explanations in a given case are best stated in syntactic or in semantic terms. We pay special attention to cases where two or more "logical forms" are (always, or in certain cases) equivalent, and explore the freedom that this gives us to devise accounts that respect syntactic structure and the range of quantifiers that instantiate the given phenomenon.
Topics and readings:
- Interrogatives, alternatives, partial wh-movement (Hamblin 1973, Karttunen 1977, Kratzer-Shimoyama 2002, Dayal 1993, Cresti 1995)
- Polyadic quantification (May 1989)
- Negation and negative concord (Ladusaw 1992, Zeijlstra 2004, de Swart and Sag 2002)
- Lattice theory and applications (Szabolcsi 1997)
- Cross-sentential anaphora (Gamut II and refs therein)
- Different quantifiers, different scopes (Szabolcsi 2000 and refs therein)
- Weak islands: syntax or semantics? (Szabolcsi 2006 and refs therein)
- Cresti 1995, Extraction and reconstruction. Natural Language Semantics.
- Dayal 1993, Scope marking as indirect wh-dependency. Natural Language Semantics.
- De Swart—Sag 2002, Negative concord in Romance. Linguistics and Philosophy.
- Gamut II, Ch 7.
- Hamblin 1973, Questions in Montague English. Foundations of Language
- Karttunen 1977, Syntax and semantics of questions. Linguistics and Philosophy.
- Kratzer-Shimoyama 2002, Indeterminate pronouns: the view from Japanese. Semanticsarchive.net.
- Ladusaw 1992, Expressing negation. SALT 2.
- May 1989, Interpreting Logical Form. Linguistics and Philosophy.
- Szabolcsi 1997, Background notions in lattice theory and generalized quantifiers. Ways of Scope Taking.
- Szabolcsi 2000, Syntax of scope. Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory.
- Szabolcsi 2006, Strong and weak islands. Blackwell Companion to Syntax.
- Zeijlstra 2004, Sentential Negation and Negative Concord. LOT.
Last Modified: February 11, 2006