G61.3340 Seminar in Semantics:
Interacting with Negation
Prof. Anna Szabolcsi
Fall 2002
Recently I have been exploring largely uncharted territory: positive polarity and its relation to negative polarity and negative concord and the cross-linguistic variation in the interaction of conjunctions and disjunctions with negation. The seminar will focus on these topics and provide some background for their study. Requirements: weekly readings, some of them presented by students; occasional home assignments; a term paper related to the subject matter of the course, presented in class.
Tentative Calendar
| 9/4 | Overview |
| 9/11 | Monotonicity Szabolcsi, Anna (1997) Background notions in lattice theory and generalized quantifiers. In Szabolcsi, ed. Ways of Scope Taking. Kluwer. |
| 9/18 | NPI-licensers: decreasing, antiadditive, antimorphic, non-veridical, Strawson-decreasing operators Ladusaw, William (1980), Polarity Sensitivity as Inherent Scope Relations. Garland. Zwarts, Frans (1981), Negatief polaire uitdrukkingen 1. GLOT 4: 35-132. Giannakidou, Anastasia (1998), Polarity Sensitivity as (Non)Veridical Dependency. John Benjamins. von Fintel, Kai (1999), NPI-licensing, Strawson-entailment, and context dependency. Journal of Semantics 16. |
| 9/25 | NPI-licensing and scalar semantics Lahiri, Utpal (1997), Focus and negative polarity in Hindi. Natural Language Semantics 6: 57-23. Rooth, Mats (1995), A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 4. Kadmon, Nirit and Fred Landman (1993), Any. Linguistics and Philosophy 16: 353-422. Chierchia, Gennaro (2001), Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena, and the syntax/pragmatics interface. Ms., University of Milan. |
| 10/1 not 10/2 | wrap up NPI matters, if unfinished; otherwise no class |
| 10/9 | Positive Polarity Szabolcsi, Anna, Positive Polarity - Negative Polarity, Ms. NYU. http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/lingu/people/faculty/szabolcsi/papers/ |
| 10/16 | Szabolcsi: Positive Polarity P Negative Polarity, cont'd |
| 10/22 not 10/23 | Szabolcsi: Positive Polarity P Negative Polarity, cont'd Henriette de Swart and Ivan A. Sag, (2002), Negation and negative concord in Romance. Linguistics and Philosophy 25/4: 373-417. |
| 10/30 | - - |
| 11/6 | Paul Postal on any and no |
| 11/13 | Cross-linguistic variation in the invertory of PPIs Szabolcsi, Anna, Hungarian disjunctions and positive polarity. Kenesei- Siptár, eds., Approaches to Hungarian 8. Akadémiai, 2002. http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/lingu/people/faculty/szabolcsi/papers/ |
| 11/20-27 | Conjunctions vis-a-vis negation Szabolcsi, Anna and Bill Haddican, Plurals and conjunctions are not always alike. Ms. New York University. Landman, Fred (2000), Events and Plurality. Kluwer. Schwarzschild, Roger (1993-4), Plurals, presuppositions and the sources of distributivity. Natural Language Semantics 2/3: 20-248. |
| 12/4 | Presentation of student papers |
Last Modified: August 27, 2002