semantics etc.

work

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

See below for a list of papers, handouts, slides, and class notes. For a full list, see my CV.

0. Kai von Fintel & Irene Heim. 1997–. Intensional semantics. URL: https://github.com/fintelkai/fintel-heim-intensional-notes. Lecture notes for Advanced Semantics, updated regularly. (see also the often-cited 2011 edition).

1. Kai von Fintel & Robert Pasternak. 2025. Attitudes, aboutness, and indirect restriction. Linguistics and Philosophy. doi:10.1007/s10988-025-09432-0.

2. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2025. Questions that are merely posed, not asked. Slides from recent talks on ongoing work. URL: https://web.mit.edu/fintel/ks-mpq-slides-arizona-2025-03-21.pdf.

3. Kai von Fintel. 2024. Enough! In M Ryan Bochnak, Eva Csipak, Lisa Matthewson, Marcin Morzycki & Daniel K E Reisinger (eds.), The title of this volume is shorter than its contributions are allowed to be: Papers in honour of Hotze Rullmann, 145–156. (University of British Columbia Occasional Papers in Linguistics (UBCOPL) 9). URL: https://lingpapers.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2024/11/UBCOPL_Hotzes_Volume_Fintel.pdf.

4. Cleo Condoravdi & Kai von Fintel. 2024. Enough! The linguistics of sufficiency. Handouts and slides from a class taught at CreteLing 2024. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/condoravdi-fintel-creteling2024-enough-class.zip.

5. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2024. Comments on Krifka. Slides from commentary on a talk by Manfred Krifka at a ZAS workshop on speech-act related operators. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2024-krifka-comments.pdf.

6. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2023. Prolegomena to a theory of X-marking. Linguistics and Philosophy 46(6). 1467–1510. doi:10.1007/s10988-023-09390-5.

7. Kai von Fintel. 2022. In a word. Seven short columns for the Monitor Weekly. URL: https://kaivonfintel.org/inaword.

8. Kai von Fintel. 2021. How weak is your want? Note. doi:10.5281/zenodo.5123513.

9. Kai von Fintel & Anthony S. Gillies. 2021. Still going strong. Natural Language Semantics 29(1). 91–113. doi:10.1007/s11050-020-09171-x. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-gillies-2021-stillgoingstrong.pdf.

10. David Beaver & Kai von Fintel. 2019. Variable costs. Website for course taught at ESSLLI 2019 in Riga, Latvia. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/beaver-fintel-2019-dk-costs-esslli.pdf.

11. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2019. The Only connectives. Slides from talks in Utrecht and Frankfurt. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2019-only-slides.pdf.

12. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2019. Since ~~since~~. In Daniel Altshuler & Jessica Rett (eds.), The semantics of plurals, focus, degrees, and times: Essays in honor of Roger Schwarzschild, 305–333. Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-04438-1_15. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2019-since.pdf.

13. Kai von Fintel. 2018. Conditional desires. Slides from a linguistics colloquium at Georgetown University. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/k-cd-slides.pdf.

14. Kai von Fintel. 2018. On the monotonicity of desire ascriptions. Incomplete notes. doi:10.5281/zenodo.5116584.

15. Kai von Fintel. 2018. Bridges to philosophy. Slides from a talk at the workshop “Semantics 2018: Looking Ahead”, part of Angelika Fest 2018-01-01, UMass Amherst. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2018-ak-bridges.pdf.

16. Kai von Fintel & Edward L. Keenan. 2018. Determiners, conservativity, witnesses. Journal of Semantics 35(1). 207–217. doi:10.1093/jos/ffx018. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-keenan-2018-witness.html.

17. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2017. A modest proposal for the meaning of imperatives. In Ana Arregui, Marı́a Luisa Rivero & Andrés Salanova (eds.), Modality across syntactic categories, 288–319. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718208.003.0013. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2017-modest.pdf.

18. Kai von Fintel. 2016. How to do conditional things with words. Slides from keynote lecture at the 3rd International Conference of the American Pragmatics Association (AMPRA), Indiana University. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/k-csa-ampra.pdf.

19. Kai von Fintel. 2016. If. Slides from a public lecture at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts and Languages (CIDRAL), Manchester, UK. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/k-if-cidral.pdf.

20. Kai von Fintel. 2016. On the absence of certain ambiguities in some contexts. Handout from a Linguistics Colloquium at Universität Tübingen. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2016-sera.pdf.

21. Kai von Fintel & David Beaver. 2015. Variable costs. Slides from an invited talk at the Universität Göttingen. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/beaver-fintel-2015-costs-slides.pdf.

22. Kai von Fintel & Anthony S. Gillies. 2015. Hedging your ifs and vice versa. Unpublished manuscript. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-gillies-2015-hedging.pdf.

23. Kai von Fintel. 2014. Quantifier domain restriction. Slides from an invited tutorial talk at the Rutgers Semantics Colloquium. URL: https://web.mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2014-rutgers-domains.pdf.

24. Kai von Fintel, Danny Fox & Sabine Iatridou. 2014. Definiteness as maximal informativeness. In Luka Crnič & Uli Sauerland (eds.), The art and craft of semantics: A festschrift for Irene Heim, vol. 1, 165–174. Cambridge, MA: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. URL: http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jZiNmM4N/FintelFoxIatridou.pdf.

25. Kai von Fintel & Angelika Kratzer. 2014. Modal comparisons: Two dilletantes in search of an expert. In Luka Crnič & Uli Sauerland (eds.), The art and craft of semantics: A festschrift for Irene Heim, vol. 1, 175–179. Cambridge, MA: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. URL: http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jZiNmM4N/FintelKratzer.pdf.

26. Kai von Fintel. 2012. The best we can (expect to) get? Challenges to the classic semantics for deontic modals. Paper presented in a session on Deontic Modals at the Central APA, February 17, 2012. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2012-apa-ought.pdf.

27. Kai von Fintel. 2012. Subjunctive conditionals. In Gillian Russell & Delia Graff Fara (eds.), The Routledge companion to philosophy of language, 466–477. New York: Routledge. doi:1721.1/95784. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2012-subjunctives.pdf.

28. Kai von Fintel & Anthony S. Gillies. 2011. Comments on Lennertz: “Epistemic modal belief reports are a problem for von Fintel and Gillies”. Invited commentary at the 85th Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-gillies-2011-lennertz-apa.txt.

29. Kai von Fintel. 2011. Conditionals. In Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia Maienborn & Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics: An international handbook of meaning, vol. 2, 1515–1538. (Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 33.2). Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter Mouton. doi:10.1515/9783110255072.1515. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2011-hsk-conditionals.pdf.

30. Kai von Fintel & Anthony S. Gillies. 2011. Might made right. In Andy Egan & Brian Weatherson (eds.), Epistemic modality, 108–130. Oxford: Oxford University Press. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-gillies-2011-mmr.pdf.

31. Kai von Fintel & Anthony S. Gillies. 2010. Must … stay … strong! Natural Language Semantics 18(4). 351–383. doi:10.1007/s11050-010-9058-2. URL: https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/65909.

32. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2009. Morphology, syntax, and semantics of modals. Materials for LSA Institute class, University of California, Berkeley, CA. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2009-lsa-modals.pdf.

33. Kai von Fintel. 2008. What is presupposition accommodation, again? Philosophical Perspectives 22(1). 137–170. doi:10.1111/j.1520-8583.2008.00144.x. URL: https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/66138.

34. Kai von Fintel & Anthony S. Gillies. 2008. CIA leaks. The Philosophical Review 117(1). 77–98. doi:10.1215/00318108-2007-025. URL: https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/51041.

35. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2008. How to say ought in Foreign: The composition of weak necessity modals. In Jacqueline Guéron & Jacqueline Lecarme (eds.), Time and modality, 115–141. (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 75). Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-8354-9. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2008-ought.pdf.

36. Kai von Fintel & Lisa Matthewson. 2008. Universals in semantics. The Linguistic Review 25(1-2). 139–201. doi:10.1515/TLIR.2008.004. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-matthewson-2008-universals.pdf.

37. Kai von Fintel. 2007. If: The biggest little word. Slides from a plenary address given at the Georgetown University Roundtable, March 8, 2007. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2007-if-gurt.pdf.

38. Kai von Fintel & Anthony S. Gillies. 2007. An opinionated guide to epistemic modality. In Tamar Szabó Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford studies in epistemology: Volume 2, 32–62. Oxford University Press. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-gillies-2007-ose2.pdf.

39. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2007. Anatomy of a modal construction. Linguistic Inquiry 38(3). 445–483. doi:10.1162/ling.2007.38.3.445. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2007-anatomy.pdf.

40. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2006. What to do if you want to go to Harlem: Notes on anankastic conditionals and related matters. Slides from a Linguistics Colloquium given at University of Tübingen. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2006-harlem-tubingen.pdf.

41. Kai von Fintel. 2006. Modality and language. In Donald M. Borchert (ed.), Encyclopedia of philosophy – second edition, vol. 10, 20–27. Detroit: MacMillan Reference USA. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2006-modality.pdf.

42. Kai von Fintel. 2006. Ordinary conditionals. Slides from a presentation at the UConn Conditionals Conference, April 8, 2006. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2006-uconn-conditionals.pdf.

43. Kai von Fintel. 2005. Comments on Kaufmann. Contribution to the 4th Michigan Workshop on Philosophy and Linguistics, comments on Stefan Kaufmann’s paper “Local and Global Interpretations of Conditionals”, October 29, 2005. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2005-comments-on-kaufmann.pdf.

44. Kai von Fintel. 2005. Postscript to Whatever: Comments on Condoravdi. Handout from a Talk at LSA Workshop on “Context and Content: Topics in Formal Pragmatics”, July 15, 2005-01-01, Cambridge, MA. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2005-condoravdi-comments.pdf.

45. Kai von Fintel. 2005. How to count situations (notes towards a user’s manual). Unpublished manuscript, MIT. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2005-counting.pdf.

46. Kai von Fintel. 2005. Tense in conditionals. Handout from a talk in a seminar at Cornell. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2005-tense-in-conditionals.pdf.

47. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2005. Anatomy of a modal. In Jon Gajewski, Valentine Hacquard, Bernard Nickel & Seth Yalcin (eds.), New work on modality. (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 52). Department of Linguistics; Philosophy, MIT. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2005-anatomy-wp.pdf.

48. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2005. What to do if you want to go to Harlem: Anankastic conditionals and related matters. Unpublished manuscript, MIT. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2005-harlem.pdf.

49. Kai von Fintel. 2004. Comments on Beaver: Presupposition accommodation and quantifier domains. In Hans Kamp & Barbara Partee (eds.), Context-dependence in the analysis of linguistic meaning, 405–410. (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface). Amsterdam: Elsevier. [written in 1995]. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2004-comments-on-beaver.pdf.

50. Kai von Fintel. 2004. Comments on Reinhart: The syntactic roots of discourse cohesion. In Hans Kamp & Barbara Partee (eds.), Context-dependence in the analysis of linguistic meaning, 411–418. (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface). Amsterdam: Elsevier. [written in 1995]. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2004-comments-on-reinhart.pdf.

51. Kai von Fintel. 2004. Would you believe it? The king of France is back! Presuppositions and truth-value intuitions. In Marga Reimer & Anne Bezuidenhout (eds.), Descriptions and beyond, 315–341. Oxford University Press. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2004-kof.pdf.

52. Kai von Fintel. 2004. A minimal theory of adverbial quantification. In Hans Kamp & Barbara Partee (eds.), Context-dependence in the analysis of linguistic meaning, 137–175. (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface). Amsterdam: Elsevier. [written in 1995]. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2004-minimal.pdf.

53. Kai von Fintel. 2004. Minimal replies to Dekker, Hajičová & Sgall, Berman, and DeSwart. In Hans Kamp & Barbara Partee (eds.), Context-dependence in the analysis of linguistic meaning, 541–547. (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface). Amsterdam: Elsevier. [written in 1995]. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2004-minimal-replies.pdf.

54. Kai von Fintel. 2004. How multi-dimensional is quotation? Comments on Chris Potts’ The Dimensions of Quotation, Harvard-MIT-UConn Workshop on Indexicals, Speech Acts, and Logophors, November 20, 2004. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2004-pottsquotecomments.pdf.

55. Kai von Fintel. 2003. Epistemic modals and conditionals revisited. Slides from a linguistics colloquium at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2003-umass-epistemics.pdf.

56. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2003. Epistemic containment. Linguistic Inquiry 34(2). 173–198. doi:10.1162/002438903321663370. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2003-ec.pdf.

57. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2002. Unembeddable meanings: The meanings of epistemic modality. Slides from an invited talk at Sinn und Bedeutung 7, Universität Konstanz. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2002-epistemic-konstanz.pdf.

58. Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2002. If and when if-clauses can restrict quantifiers. Unpublished manuscript, MIT [written for the Workshop in Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Michigan, November 8–10, 2002]. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-iatridou-2002-ifwhen.pdf.

59. Kai von Fintel. 2001. Some choicepoints in the syntax/semantics architecture for tense (and aspect). Seminar handout. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2001-choicepoints.pdf.

60. Kai von Fintel. 2001. Conditional strengthening: A case study in implicature. Unpublished manuscript, MIT. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2001-condstrength.pdf.

61. Kai von Fintel. 2001. Counterfactuals in a dynamic context. In Michael Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: A life in language, 123–152. MIT Press. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2001-counterfactuals.pdf.

62. Kai von Fintel. 2000. What is presupposition accommodation? Unpublished manuscript, MIT. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2000-accomm.pdf.

63. Kai von Fintel. 2000. Exceptive constructions. Seminar Notes, MIT. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2000-exceptives.pdf.

64. Kai von Fintel. 2000. Singleton indefinites (re. Schwarzschild 2000). Handout from a talk to MIT Syntax-Semantics Reading Group. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2000-singleton.pdf.

65. Kai von Fintel. 2000. Whatever. Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 10. 27–40. doi:10.3765/salt.v10i0.3101. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-2000-whatever.pdf.

66. Kai von Fintel. 1999. Class notes on adjectives. Unpublished manuscript, MIT. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1999-adjectives.pdf.

67. Kai von Fintel. 1999. Class notes on whatever. Unpublished manuscript, MIT. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1999-WhateverClassNotes.pdf.

68. Kai von Fintel. 1999. Amount relatives and the meaning of chains. Handout of a talk given at the University of Edinburgh. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1999-amount.pdf.

69. Kai von Fintel. 1999. Quantifier domain selection and pseudo-scope. Handout from a talk at the Cornell Conference on Theories of Context Dependency. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1999-cornell-context.pdf.

70. Kai von Fintel. 1999. NPI licensing, Strawson entailment, and context dependency. Journal of Semantics 16(2). 97–148. doi:10.1093/jos/16.2.97. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1999-npi.pdf.

71. Kai von Fintel. 1998. Indicative conditionals. Handout from a talk given at Conference on Bridges and Interfaces: Function, Meaning, and Structure at the Charles University Prague (in celebration of its 650th Anniversary), March 1998. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1998-indicative-prague.pdf.

72. Kai von Fintel. 1998. Evidence for presuppositional indefinites. Unpublished manuscript, MIT. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1998-presupp-indef.pdf.

73. Kai von Fintel. 1998. Quantifiers and If-clauses. The Philosophical Quarterly 48(191). 209–214. doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00095. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1998-qandif.pdf.

74. Kai von Fintel. 1998. The semantics and pragmatics of quantifier domains. Notes for Vilem Mathesius Lectures, Prague, March 1998. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1998-qic.pdf.

75. Kai von Fintel. 1998. The presupposition of subjunctive conditionals. In Uli Sauerland & Orin Percus (eds.), The interpretive tract, 29–44. (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 25). Cambridge, MA: MITWPL. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1998-subjunctive.pdf.

76. Kai von Fintel. 1997. Bare plurals, bare conditionals, and only. Journal of Semantics 14(1). 1–56. doi:10.1093/jos/14.1.1. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1997-bare.pdf.

77. Kai von Fintel. 1997. Context and (mis)communication. Unpublished ms, responding to Chris Gauker’s “Domains of discourse” (Mind, 1997). URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1997-gauker.pdf.

78. Kai von Fintel. 1997. Some notes on disjunctive antecedents in conditionals. doi:10.5281/zenodo.10109894.

79. Kai von Fintel. 1996. Specific generics. Handout from a Linguistics Colloquium given at Rutgers University. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1996-specific-generics.pdf.

80. Kai von Fintel. 1995. The formal semantics of grammaticalization. North East Linguistics Society (NELS) 25(2). 175–189. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1995-grammar.pdf.

81. Kai von Fintel. 1994. Restrictions on quantifier domains. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts PhD thesis. Dissertation Committee: Angelika Kratzer (chair), Barbara Partee, Roger Higgins, Emmon Bach, and Philip Bricker. URL: http://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/jA3N2IwN/fintel-1994-thesis.pdf.

82. Kai von Fintel. 1993. Exceptive constructions. Natural Language Semantics 1(2). 123–148. doi:10.1007/BF00372560. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1993-exceptives.pdf.

83. Kai von Fintel. 1992. The modal-existential construction. Formal Linguistic Society of Midamerica (FLSM) 3. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1992-modal-existentials.pdf.

84. Kai von Fintel. 1991. Exceptive conditionals: The meaning of Unless. North East Linguistic Society (NELS) 22. URL: http://mit.edu/fintel/fintel-1991-unless.pdf.

85. Kai von Fintel. 1989. Theticity in generative grammar. In Emmon Bach, Angelika Kratzer & Barbara H. Partee (eds.), Papers on quantification: NSF grant BNS 8719999. (University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics (UMOP) 15). Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. URL: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/umop/vol15/iss2/7.

plans

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The goal

Still: making it through the pandemic

Upcoming

Fall 2022: Teaching a first-year discovery class called “The search for meaning”
Spring 2023: Co-teaching with Amir Anvari: (i) the second semester PhD class on advanced semantics, and (ii) a seminar on the philosophy of semantics.

Ongoing Activities

Founding co-editor (with David Beaver) of Semantics & Pragmatics.
Editorial Board Member of Natural Language Semantics, Linguistics and Philosophy, and Mind.
Reviewing for many journals and conferences.

von

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Question: How do you alphabetize your name in bibliographies?

Good question. I can only tell you what my personal rules are.

Many gory details below. But the simple gist is this: my last name is “von Fintel” but it should be alphabetized under “F” (as if the “von” was silent).

There are probably differences between German von, Dutch van, Belgian van, French de and whatever else there is, but I don’t really know much about that. My tendency is to follow my rules for von and van and also for de Swart, but I’m glad there are not many French linguists with de or the like. My colleague Michel DeGraff here at MIT is easier to deal with since the de has become an obvious part of his last name.

So here are my rules:

The last name is von Fintel, definitely NOT Fintel (which sounds derogatory to me; it’s what my teachers in high school called me when they wanted to make fun of me).
In a running text the v is small.
At the beginning of a sentence, it should probably be capitalized. As in “Von Fintel claims that …”. But I should say that it looks very strange to me to see the capital V. So, I tend to avoid starting a sentence that way at almost all costs. (For an interesting related discussion, see Arnold Zwicky’s post on such dilemmas.)
Alphabetization works this way: the name in a bibliography is “von Fintel, Kai”, but it is listed under “F”. As far as I know, the other von and van people prefer this as well.

Sort order in bibliographies

I know that this is a problem when creating automatic bibliographies. Before I made the switch to LaTeX, I used Endnote, which definitely put the von and van authors under “v” and then once the bibliography was generated and inserted into the Word document, I had to move the entries by hand to their appropriate places. With LaTeX/BibTeX, there are in principle three ways of correctly alphabetizing von.

Tricking BibTeX

As described in the LaTeX Companion (p. 404), you can force BibTeX to sort on the name without the von. The trick consists of two parts:

At the beginning of the .bib-file, write:

@preamble{"\newcommand{\SortNoop}[1]{}"}
For each author with a von etc. in the name change their name to the following:

author = "{\SortNoop{Fintel}}von Fintel, Kai"

What goes on here is that for LaTeX (which reads the .bbl-file generated by BibTeX), the \SortNoop command is defined to be vacuous, so the extra material is thrown away. But BibTeX sees the material and sorts on it.

Generating a better bibstyle

In my mind, this is the best strategy: use Patric Daly’s custom-bib package to generate your own bibliography style. One of the settings that custom-bib lets you choose is whether BibTeX should sort on the von or not. For instructions on how to use custom-bib, read the documentation of the package.

Hacking existing bibliography styles

In principle, it should be possible to slightly modify existing .bst-files (the bibliography style files for BibTeX) to change the treatment of von etc. But I haven’t tried that. I did find one hacker’s description of what to do and another ones as well.

References

Its probably not a bad idea to check the archives of the comp.text.tex usenet newsgroup for discussions of this issue. Look at the current results of a search for bibtex von. Here are some threads with more or less useful information:

about

Sun, 21 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This is the website of Kai von Fintel. I’m a professor of linguistics at MIT. I work on meaning. I have a wife, two adult children, two cats, and a dog. I live in an intentional community (Mosaic Commons Cohousing) in Berlin, Massachusetts. I am a runner. I like soccer, a lot. I was born on a cold winter’s night in a small village on the Lüneburg Heath in Northern Germany. My pronouns are he/him/his.

This isn’t the only place I’m present on the net:

For more in-depth information about my work:

My latest CV

This site currently is generated by hugo, using a modified version of the xmin theme, and hosted on netlify. There is an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.

contact

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Some notes about getting in touch with me

The only realiable way to contact me is via email. I typically respond within 24-48 hours during working hours (9am-5pm on weekdays).
If we know each other (we’ve met in real life, you’ve taken classes with me, etc.), please email me with whatever is on your mind.
If you are from “the media” and wish to interview me or commission a piece for your outlet, please email me.
If you are looking for a research position with me (MIT UROP, postdoc, …), I do not have any such positions.
If you are interested in MIT Linguistics as a prospective undergraduate or prospective PhD student, you can email me, but you should first study the relevant pages of the department website: Undergraduate Program, Graduate Program, Graduate Admissions.
If you are interested in visiting MIT Linguistics as a visiting student from another PhD program, as a visiting scholar, or as a self-funded postdoc, and would like me to support your visit, you can email me, but first make sure that our research interests are truly compatible. Please also consult the relevant pages of the department website: Visitor Programs.
My research is in semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and intersections thereof. I employ formal methods rooted in mathematics and logic. To gauge whether we are on similar wavelengths, here’s a rule of thumb that I adapt from the focus statement of the journal Semantics and Pragmatics that I co-founded:

If your work does not strongly engage with works published in the leading journals in semantics (Linguistics & Philosophy, Natural Language Semantics, Journal of Semantics, and S&P) and/or work in the proceedings of the major semantics conferences (SALT, Amsterdam Colloquium, Sinn und Bedeutung), it is unlikely that our research interests are sufficiently compatible.

In a word

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the summer of 2022 (and again briefly in 2023), I was given the opportunity to write a series of 500-word columns for the “In a word” feature in the Monitor Weekly, filling in while my friend Melissa Mohr was taking a sabbatical to work on her next book. (If you don’t know her book on swearing, “Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing”, you should definitely check it out.)

There are eight columns. I give here links to those that are (as of now) available on the web (note that a paywall kicks in after you’ve accessed three articles, so choose wisely) but also to PDF offprints. Note that as usual in the business, I had no input or say about the titles that were given to my pieces.

"‘If’ brings us into the realm of possibilities" (pdf)
“Need just the right word? German probably has it.” (pdf)
“Human experience is shared, even if words aren’t” (pdf)
“Meet the ‘noble cousins’ on the family tree of words” (pdf)
“The words that evoke ‘sound pictures’” (pdf)
“Words help construct the reality we live in” (pdf)
“Other attempts to convey irony in writing” (pdf)
“Language describes, but also changes, the world” (pdf)

Seven columns

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This summer, I published seven short columns on semanticky topics. More here: https://kaivonfintel.org/inaword.

CSSL22 X-marking

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Venue

Class taught at The 4nd Crete Summer School of Linguistics
University of Crete, Gallos, Rethymnon, Greece
July 16 to July 29, 2022

Instructor

Kai von Fintel

Course description

X-marking is a term proposed by von Fintel & Iatridou 2022 for morphological markers that have a characteristic set of uses crosslinguistically, at least the following three: (i) they are used to distinguish conditionals that are often called “counterfactual” or “subjunctive” from those that are not called that (but crucially, the marking does not actually always signal counterfactuality, nor is it consistently “subjunctive”), (ii) they are used in the expression of unattainable desires, and (iii) they are used in the construction of weak necessity modality. Some exponents of X-marking across languages include “fake past tense”, “fake imperfective aspect”, subjunctive/irrealis mood, and dedicated markers (Hungarian -nA, Russian by). In this course, we will explore the semantic side of X-marking and assess the prospects for a unified compositional analysis.

Prerequisites

Just kidding, there are no prerequisites other than being interested in the class. However, since the audience will be quite diverse, I encourage you to read an article of mine on “prerequisites”.

Refresher on intensional semantics

If you need to refresh some background on intensional semantics, it might be useful to review the first three chapters of the von Fintel & Heim textbook:

Kai von Fintel & Irene Heim. 2022. Intensional semantics. Chs.1-3.

Early readings on X-marking

These readings should get you started thinking about these topics. Do not expect to necessarily fully understand everything. I’ll try to help you get into the material when I teach the class.

Kai von Fintel. 1998. The presupposition of subjunctive conditionals. In Uli Sauerland & Orin Percus (eds.), The interpretive tract, 29–44. (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 25). Cambridge, MA: MITWPL.
Sabine Iatridou. 2000. The grammatical ingredients of counterfactuality. Linguistic Inquiry 31(2). 231–270. doi:10.1162/002438900554352.
Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2008. How to say ought in Foreign: The composition of weak necessity modals. In Jacqueline Guéron & Jacqueline Lecarme (eds.), Time and modality, 115–141. (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 75). Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-8354-9.
Kai von Fintel & Sabine Iatridou. 2022. Prolegomena to a theory of X-marking. ms, under review.

Readings on X = past

Highly recommended:

Justin Khoo. 2015. On indicative and subjunctive conditionals. Philosophers’ Imprint 15(32).
Maribel Romero. 2014. ‘Fake tense’ in counterfactuals: A temporal remoteness approach. In Luka Crnič & Uli Sauerland (eds.), The art and craft of semantics: A festschrift for Irene Heim, vol. 2, 47–63. Cambride, MA: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.

Highly recommended:

John Mackay. 2019. Modal interpretation of tense in subjunctive conditionals. Semantics and Pragmatics 12(2). 1–29.

Class materials

Slides will be posted on each class day shortly before we meet.

Surveillance publishing

Sun, 05 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Must read: an article on surveillance publishing by Jefferson Pooley

Two ditties on want

Tue, 20 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve uploaded two short notes on the semantics of desire ascriptions.

“On the monotonicity of desire ascriptions” is from a few years ago. It is cited in a recent paper by Paul Portner and Aynat Rubinstein and I figured I should make it available, since who knows if I ever get around to making a real paper out of it.
“How weak is your want?” contains a few preliminary thoughts on how “weak” the semantics of want might be.

They’re on LingBuzz, for what it’s worth, but I’ve also uploaded them at Zenodo, an open access repository run by CERN, where all materials get a permanent DOI link etc.

Full info:

Kai von Fintel. 2018. On the monotonicity of desire ascriptions. doi:10.5281/zenodo.5116584.
Kai von Fintel. 2021. How weak is your want? doi:10.5281/zenodo.5123513.

Demodalizing our terminology

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The systems we study in our field are manifested not just in spoken language but in other modalities as well, most importantly in sign languages. Other modalities as well (though often secondary in some sense) exist: written language, of course, whistled language, etc.

So, it’s unfortunate that much of our terminology is not really modality-neutral but presupposes the spoken modality:

speaker
hearer
speech act

Some terminology is arguably already neutral: utterance can be understood as anything that constitute the production of a perceptible signal, participant as a term for those who are part of an exchange of utterances is also neutral.

Some terminology at least somewhat obscures its provenance: in fact language/linguistic trace back to the tongue but maybe we can live with that. (My cursory investigation suggests that words like dialogue, interlocutor come from roots that don’t have to do with the tongue or spoken language more generally.)

The most problematic term is perhaps hearer and it’s also the one that’s fairly easy to replace: addressee seems perfectly good.

So, in my quest to demodalize my own technical discourse, I asked for suggestions on twitter. There was some lively feedback and also some pointers to relevant previous conversations (or threads, as they say there).

Here is a fairly complete list of the ideas I gathered (skipping some more facetious suggestions):

Instead of speaker: author, addressor, sender, producer, emitter, performer, utterer, encoder, effer, communicator
Instead of hearer: addressee, target, receiver, perceiver, decoder, effee
Instead of speech act: communicative act, social act, linguistic act, language act

There are pros and cons with all of these and if this was a thorough essay, I would go into that, but on brief reflection, my conclusion for now is that I will try to use

producer or utterer (wavering on this)
addressee
language act

A corollary is that work that posits a “Speech Act Phrase” (SAP) should consider switching to “Language Act Phrase” (LAP).

If you’d like to comment, please reply on twitter.

biblatex-unified on CTAN

Tue, 26 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The bibliography house style of Semantics and Pragmatics (S&P) has finally been released on CTAN: http://www.ctan.org/pkg/biblatex-unified.

Any issues with using the style can be raised at the Github site for the package: https://github.com/semprag/biblatex-sp-unified.

S&P transition

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

On October 27, 2005, I posted a short item on my blog about the then new open access journal Logical Methods in Computer Science and wrote “Maybe this will inspire us to get something similar off the ground in semantics etc.”

In my email inbox soon after, I found an email from David Beaver saying “Do you mean it?” More than a year of discussions and loads of work ensued.

We made the first public announcement about S&P at SALT 17 at UConn in May 2007. We opened for submissions in November 2007.

Our first two articles were:

Barker, Chris & Chung-chieh Shan. 2008. Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding. Semantics and Pragmatics 1. 1:1—46. doi:10.3765/sp.1.1.
Elbourne, Paul. 2009. Bishop sentences and donkey cataphora: A response to Barker and Shan. Semantics and Pragmatics 2. 1:1—7. doi:10.3765/sp.2.1.

David and I didn’t know whether this project would succeed but we were sure it was the right thing to try. We are now convinced that it was a success. The main empirical argument for this is that two very busy, established scholars at the top of our field have agreed to take the reigns.

Today on October 1, 2019, Louise McNally and Kjell Johan Sæbø officially take over as editors-in-chief of S&P.

We would like to thank everyone who has supported the journal: the entire S&P editorial team, past and present, the LSA as our publisher, the many reviewers who contribute their time and effort, and the authors who entrust their work to us. I think we can all be very proud of what we have achieved. The field is the better for it.

CSSL19 The only class

Mon, 08 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Venue

Class taught at The 3nd Crete Summer School of Linguistics
University of Crete, Gallos, Rethymnon, Greece
July 13–26, 2019

Instructor

Kai von Fintel

Course description

This intermediate to advanced class will review what is known about exclusive markers like only and its cousins (in English and cross-linguistically). Topics include dimensions of meaning, mirativity, NPI licensing, the role of exclusives in expressions of sufficiency, the interaction with bare plurals and bare conditionals.

Pre-class survey

If you’re going to take the only class, please fill out a short survey, to help me plan the class.

Prerequisites

Early readings

These readings should get you started thinking about these topics. Do not expect to necessarily fully understand everything. I’ll try to help you get into the material when I teach the class.

von Fintel, Kai. 1993. Exceptive constructions. Natural Language Semantics 1(2). 123–148. doi:10.1007/BF00372560.
von Fintel, Kai. 1997. Bare plurals, bare conditionals, and only. Journal of Semantics 14(1). 1–56. doi:10.1093/jos/14.1.1.
von Fintel, Kai. 1999. NPI licensing, Strawson entailment, and context dependency. Journal of Semantics 16(2). 97–148. doi:10.1093/jos/16.2.97.
von Fintel, Kai & Sabine Iatridou. 2007. Anatomy of a modal construction. Linguistic Inquiry 38(3). 445–483. doi:10.1162/ling.2007.38.3.445.
Coppock, Elizabeth & David I. Beaver. 2014. Principles of the exclusive muddle. Journal of Semantics 31(3). 371–432. doi:10.1093/jos/fft007.
Alonso-Ovalle, Luis & Aron Hirsch. 2018. Keep only strong. SALT 28. 251–270. doi:10.3765/salt.v28i0.4439.

Class 1: Basics of exclusives (slides)

Horn, Laurence R. 1969. A presuppositional analysis of Only and Even. Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) 5. 98–107.
Coppock, Elizabeth & David I. Beaver. 2014. Principles of the exclusive muddle. Journal of Semantics 31(3). 371–432. doi:10.1093/jos/fft007.

Class 2: Basics of exceptives (slides)

von Fintel, Kai. 1993. Exceptive constructions. Natural Language Semantics 1(2). 123–148. doi:10.1007/BF00372560.
von Fintel, Kai. 2000. Exceptive constructions. Seminar notes, MIT.
Gajewski, Jon. 2008. NPI any and connected exceptive phrases. Natural Language Semantics 16(1). 69–110. doi:10.1007/s11050-007-9025-8.
Hirsch, Aron. 2016. An unexceptional semantics for expressions of exception. Proceedings of the Penn Linguistics Conference 39. 139–148. http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol22/iss1/16.
García-Álvarez, Iván. 2008. Generality and exception: A study in the semantics of exceptives. Stanford University PhD thesis. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1671091441&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=60577&RQT=309&VName=PQD

Class 3: Clausal exceptives (slides)

Potsdam, Eric. 2018. Exceptives and ellipsis. North East Linguistics Society (NELS) 48. 259–268. http://users.clas.ufl.edu/potsdam/papers/NELS48.pdf.
Potsdam, Eric & Maria Polinksy. 2019. Clausal and phrasal exceptives. Poster presented at GLOW.
Vostrikova, Ekaterina. 2019. Conditional analysis of clausal exceptives. ms. UMass Amherst.

Class 4: Scalar only, Mirativity (slides)

Klinedinst, Nathan. 2005. Scales and Only. Generals paper. UCLA.
Coppock, Elizabeth & David I. Beaver. 2014. Principles of the exclusive muddle. Journal of Semantics 31(3). 371–432. doi:10.1093/jos/fft007.
Greenberg, Yael. 2019. Even and Only: Arguing for parallels in scalarity and in constructing alternatives. North East Linguistics Society (NELS) 49. https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004278.

Class 5: only, NPI licensing, and the syntax of focus (slides)

von Fintel, Kai. 1999. NPI licensing, Strawson entailment, and context dependency. Journal of Semantics 16(2). 97–148. doi:10.1093/jos/16.2.97.
Wagner, Michael. 2006. Association by movement: Evidence from NPI-licensing. Natural Language Semantics 14(4). 297–324. doi:10.1007/s11050-007-9005-z.
Erlewine, Michael Yoshitaka & Hadas Kotek. 2018. Focus association by movement: Evidence from Tanglewood. Linguistic Inquiry 49(3). 441–463. doi:10.1162/ling_a_00263.

Class 6: only, bare plurals, bare conditionals (slides)

von Fintel, Kai. 1997. Bare plurals, bare conditionals, and only. Journal of Semantics 14(1). 1–56. doi:10.1093/jos/14.1.1.
Bassi, Itai & Moshe E. Bar-Lev. 2017. A unified existential semantics for bare conditionals. Sinn und Bedeutung 21. https://sites.google.com/site/sinnundbedeutung21/proceedings-preprints/SuB%2021%20Bar-Lev%20and%20Bassi%20final.pdf.
Herburger, Elena. 2018. Bare conditionals in the red. Linguistics and Philosophy 42(2). 131–175. doi:10.1007/s10988-018-9242-2.

Class 7: (Minimal) sufficiency (slides)

von Fintel, Kai & Sabine Iatridou. 2005. Anatomy of a modal. In Jon Gajewski, Valentine Hacquard, Bernard Nickel & Seth Yalcin (eds.), New work on modality. (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 51). Department of Linguistics; Philosophy, MIT.
von Fintel, Kai & Sabine Iatridou. 2007. Anatomy of a modal construction. Linguistic Inquiry 38(3). 445–483. doi:10.1162/ling.2007.38.3.445.
Coppock, Elizabeth & David I. Beaver. 2014. Principles of the exclusive muddle. Journal of Semantics 31(3). 371–432. doi:10.1093/jos/fft007.
Franke, Michael. 2006. Teleological necessity and only. Proceedings of the ESSLI Student Session 11.
Alonso-Ovalle, Luis & Aron Hirsch. 2018. Keep only strong. SALT 28. 251–270. doi:10.3765/salt.v28i0.4439.
Coppock, Elizabeth & Anna Lindahl. 2015. Minimal sufficiency readings in conditionals. Proceedings of the Texas Linguistic Society 15. 24–38.

Class 8: The only connectives (slides)

No readings

Nurses say yes and no

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

[crossposted to Language Log]

Question #1 on this November’s ballot in Massachusetts concerns a proposed law to limit the number of patients that can be assigned to a nurse at any one time. More than $15 million dollars have already been spent on campaigning about this question. Lawn signs on both sides of the debate abound in the state:

Now, inquiring minds might wonder: what is it, do nurses say yes or do they say no?

The grammatical construction used by the signs is known in linguistics as a “bare plural”. The plural is “bare” in that it doesn’t come with any determiners or quantifiers (such as “most nurses”, “some nurses”, and so on).

Each sign read on its own invites an interpretation like “nurses, in general, say yes/no”. This is called the “generic” or “quasi-universal” interpretation in semantic studies on bare plurals. When read generically, the two signs contradict each other: they can’t both be true, can they? So, should one of the campaigns be investigated for making a false claim (as if that’s a problem these days)?

But conveniently, English bare plurals have another interpretation, called “existential” in the semantics trade. So, when I say that rabbits ate my lettuce plants, I’m not saying that rabbits in general ate my lettuce. Instead, the claim is that some rabbits did it. If the bare plural “nurses” on the signs is read existentially, the claims are not in conflict. Some nurses say yes, some say no, big deal.

Are the signs intended to be read existentially? Of course not. Surely, it would be surprising to find lawn signs that say “some nurses say yes”. That doesn’t seem like a convincing argument for a yes-vote.

So, what’s going on? The inherent ambiguity or underspecificity of bare plurals allows the campaigners to convey strong claims but to have plausible deniability if ever challenged on those claims. One sometimes hears that the fact that language is ambiguous, vague, and context-dependent is some kind of flaw. But clearly, these properties are very useful as well, not least for clever campaigners. Making the addressees come up with the intended interpretation without specifically committing to it is a splendid way of saying one thing while maybe not really saying it.

[Update:] As pointed out to me by Michelle Yuan, another aspect of these signs is rooted in the essentialist signal sent by generic bare plurals. By saying “nurses say yes/no”, what each side is actually claiming is that real nurses say yes/no. It would be much closer to the truth if the signs said “management nurses say no” and “union nurses say yes”, but even that is of course an oversimplification. The very problematic essentialism often inherent in bare plural statements is also something that Mark Liberman mentions in his follow-up post, with many more references.

CSSL18 The linguistics of desire

Mon, 30 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Venue

Class taught at The 2nd Crete Summer School of Linguistics
University of Crete, Gallos, Rethymnon, Greece
July 16-27, 2018

Instructors

Kai von Fintel
Sabine Iatridou

Course description

In this intermediate/advanced class, we will discuss classic and current work on the semantics and, to a lesser extent, syntax of desire constructions. We will mostly focus on wanting, wishing, hoping, intending. There are plenty of parallels and connections, for example to deontic modality, teleological modality, imperatives, optatives. Among other things, the class will help students become comfortable with work in intensional semantics.

Pre-class survey

If you’re going to take the desire class, please fill out a short survey, to help us plan the class.

Prerequisites

Just kidding, there are no prerequisites other than being interested in the class. However, since the audience will be quite diverse, we encourage you to read an article by Kai on “prerequisites”.

Q&A

If you have any questions about the material covered in this class, please ask them in a shared Google doc. We will try to answer questions in the document or via other channels.

Eight topics

Introduction to possible worlds semantics.
The main semantic questions about desires. Belief-relativity, monotonicity, conflicting desires.
The syntax of desire.
Complement/mood selection.
Conditional desires.
Anankastic conditionals.
X-marking.
X-marked desires.

1. Possible worlds semantics (Slides)

von Fintel, Kai & Irene Heim. 2011. Intensional Semantics. Especially chapters 1–5.

2. Semantics of desire (Slides)

Heim, Irene. 1992. Presupposition projection and the semantics of attitude verbs. Journal of Semantics 9(3). 183–221. doi:10.1093/jos/9.3.183.
von Fintel, Kai. 1999. NPI licensing, Strawson entailment, and context dependency. Journal of Semantics 16(2). 97–148. doi:10.1093/jos/16.2.97.
Villalta, Elisabeth. 2008. Mood and gradability: An investigation of the subjunctive mood in Spanish. Linguistics and Philosophy 31(4). 467–522. doi:10.1007/s10988-008-9046-x.
Crnič, Luka. 2011. Getting even. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD thesis. Especially Appendix A “(Non-)monotonicity of desire”, pp. 162-186.
von Fintel, Kai. 2012. The best we can (expect to) get? Challenges to the classic semantics for deontic modals. ms.
Rubinstein, Aynat. 2017. Straddling the line between attitude verbs and necessity modals. In Ana Arregui, María Luisa Rivero & Andrés Salanova (eds.), Modality across syntactic categories, 109–131. Oxford University Press.
Grano, Thomas. 2017. Beyond belief: Desire reports and the typology of attitude predicates. Draft chapter of a book on attitude reports.
Phillips-Brown, Milo. 2017. I want to, but …. Sinn und Bedeutung 21.

3. Syntax of desire (Slides)

Pesetsky, David. 1991. Zero syntax: Vol. 2: Infinitives. ms.
Grano, Thomas. 2017. Restructuring at the syntax-semantics interface. In Lukasz Jedrzejowski & Ulrike Demske (eds.), Infinitives at the syntax-semantics interface: A diachronic perspective, 31–54. (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 306). De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110520583-002.
Wurmbrand, Susi. 2004. Two types of restructuring: Lexical vs. functional. Lingua 114(8). 991–1014. doi:10.1016/s0024-3841(03)00102-5.
Larson, Richard, Marcel den Dikken & Peter Ludlow. 2017. Intensional transitive verbs and abstract clausal complementation.

3a. Temporal issues

Abusch, Dorit. 2004. On the temporal composition of infinitives. In Jacqueline Guéron & Jacqueline Lecarme (eds.), The syntax of time, 27–53. MIT Press.
Banerjee, Neil. 2017. Embedded subject licensing properties of hope. ms, MIT.

4. Complement/Mood selection (Slides)

Portner, Paul & Aynat Rubinstein. 2012. Mood and contextual commitment. Semantics and Linguistic Theory 22. 461–487. doi:10.3765/salt.v22i0.2642.
Silk, Alex. 2018. Commitment and states of mind with mood and modality. Natural Language Semantics 26(2). 125–166. doi:10.1007/s11050-018-9144-4.
Anand, Pranav & Valentine Hacquard. 2013. Epistemics and attitudes. Semantics and Pragmatics 6(8). 1–59. doi:10.3765/sp.6.8.
Kratzer, Angelika. 2016. Evidential moods in attitude and speech reports. Slides from a talk given at the University of Pennsylvania (May 5, 2016), the 1st Syncart Workshop (Siena, July 13, 2016), and the University of Connecticut (September 9, 2016).
Moulton, Keir. 2015. CPs: Copies and compositionality. Linguistic Inquiry 46(2). 305–342.
Bogal-Albritten, Elizabeth. 2017. Basic pieces, complex meanings: Building attitudes in Navajo and beyond.
Quer, Josep. 2001. Interpreting mood. Probus 13(1). 81–111. doi:10.1515/prbs.13.1.81.
Quer, Josep. 2017. Subjunctives. In Martin Everaert & Henk C. van Riemsdijk (eds.), The wiley blackwell companion to syntax, second edition. doi:10.1002/9781118358733.wbsyncom113.

5. Conditional desires (Slides)

Kaufmann, Magdalena & Stefan Kaufmann. 2015. Conditionals and modality. In Shalom Lappin & Chris Fox (eds.). The handbook of contemporary semantic theory. Second Edition. Wiley. doi:10.1002/9781118882139.ch8.

6. Anankastic conditionals (Slides)

Condoravdi, Cleo & Sven Lauer. 2016. Anankastic conditionals are just conditionals. Semantics and Pragmatics 9(8). 1–69. doi:10.3765/sp.9.8.
Phillips-Brown, Milo. 2018. Anankastic conditionals are still a mystery: Reply to Condoravdi and Lauer. ms.

7. X-marking (Slides)

von Fintel, Kai. 1998. The presupposition of subjunctive conditionals. In Uli Sauerland & Orin Percus (eds.), The interpretive tract, 29–44. (MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 25). Cambridge, MA: MITWPL.
Iatridou, Sabine. 2000. The grammatical ingredients of counterfactuality. Linguistic Inquiry 31(2). 231–270. doi:10.1162/002438900554352.
von Fintel, Kai & Sabine Iatridou. 2008. How to say ought in Foreign: The composition of weak necessity modals. In Jacqueline Guéron & Jacqueline Lecarme (eds.), Time and modality, 115–141. (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 75). Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-8354-9.

8. X-marked desires (Slides)

von Fintel, Kai & Sabine Iatridou. 2017. X-marked desires: What wanting and wishing cross-linguistically can tell us about the ingredients of counterfactuality. Slides from a talk at Philosophical Linguistics and Linguistical Philosophy Workshop, Tarrytown, NY.

Keenan & I on witnesses

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In the fall of 1984, just back from half a year at Cambridge University, I switched universities from Münster to Köln. While in Cambridge, I had decided to study linguistics in addition to English and Philosophy. I did eventually take some intro classes, but what really sucked me in was an advanced seminar offered by Professor Paul Otto Samuelsdorff, who somehow had a manuscript copy of “Boolean semantics for natural language” by Ed Keenan and Leonard Faltz. In the seminar, Samuelsdorff and three of us students embarked on a close study of the book. While I had the mathematical background, everything else was new and exciting. In the same semester, I worked my way through Barwise & Cooper’s “Generalized quantifiers and natural language” and I also discovered Larry Horn’s thesis “On the semantic properties of logical operators in English”. Those three works taken together were simply a revelation and made me decide that this was my calling and that I was going to be a semanticist. [See my post on Eco for further stuff about that time.]

During my time as a graduate student, I met Ed several times at various conferences where I was presenting my work on exceptive phrases. One time he was in Amherst to give talks about the semantics of reflexives and the two of us spent a pleasant afternoon in the Black Sheep calculating and speculating about various technical ideas in generalized quantifier theory that had come up in my work.

Fast forward 25 years or so, and we’ve co-authored a paper:

Kai von Fintel and Edward L Keenan. 2018. Determiners, Conservativity, Witnesses. Journal of Semantics, https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffx018. [If you don’t have access to JoS, here’s a free access link.]

Abstract:

A cherished semantic universal is that determiners are conservative (Barwise & Cooper 1981; Keenan & Stavi 1986). Well-known problem cases are only (if it has determiner uses) and certain uses of proportional determiners like many (Westerståhl 1985). Fortuny (2017), in a retracted contribution to this journal, proposed a new constraint (the Witness Set Constraint) to replace Conservativity. He claimed that his constraint is satisfied by only and the Westerståhl-many, thus correctly allowing the existence of these non-conservative determiners, whilst it is not satisfied by unattested non-conservative determiners (such as allnon). In fact, we show here that only does not satisfy Fortuny’s Witness Set Constraint (nor does Westerståhl-many, which we leave to the readers to convince themselves of). Upon reflection, it turns out that the reason is simple: the Witness Set Constraint is in fact equivalent to Conservativity. There simply cannot be non-conservative determiners that satisfy the Witness Set Constraint. We consider further weakening of the Witness Set Constraint but show that this would allow unattested determiners.

Working with one of my scientific idols has been quite an honor (and pleasure).

More Zombie Lingua shenanigans

Fri, 18 Aug 2017 10:17:34 +0000

[This is a joint post by Eric Baković and Kai von Fintel, crossposted from Language Log.]

Regular Language Log readers will be familiar with our continuing coverage of the goings-on at what we in the linguistics community have given the name Zombie Lingua -- the Elsevier journal once universally known by its still-official name, Lingua -- a journal that we believe should have been allowed to die a respectable death when its entire editorial board resigned en masse at the end of 2015 to start the new (and flourishing!) fair Open Access journal Glossa, published by Ubiquity Press.

Instead, Elsevier chose to prop the old journal up, dust it off, and continue to publish articles. The first few months to a year of Zombie Lingua's macabre semi-existence were helped along by the fact that there was a backlog of already-accepted articles, as well as expected articles for special issues that had already seen some articles published -- and also by the astonishingly quick acceptance and publication of other articles in the revision backlog. The then-interim editor-in-chief, Harry Whitaker, must have been very eager to clear the decks and start off with a clean slate -- and to keep the flow of publications going, of course, lest the journal be truly dead.

Whitaker is now officially co-editor-in-chief along with Marta Dynel, and they have recently authored an editorial announcing the direction in which they say they are now taking the journal. Whitaker and Dynel claim that Zombie Lingua is "returning to its roots" of "General Linguistics and cognate branches", which they implicitly and disingenuously contrast with what Lingua had been publishing under the previous editorship. (See also this "publisher's note", where the journal's return-to-roots is boastfully claimed to be "the reality of the future.")

To those who have been keeping tabs on what has been published entirely under the current Zombie Lingua editorship, the editorial reads more like a defense of an internal decision to lower their editorial standards. In what is perhaps the most egregious case, the editors finally withdrew a published article that was clearly plagiarized -- though reluctantly and after an unforgivably protracted period, and without acknowledgement of the charge of plagiarism.

It's also worth noting that the Zombie Lingua editorial board that has been assembled has both expanded and contracted over time -- contracted because a few new members had second thoughts, (re-)weighed the pros and cons, and decided that an extra line on their CV wasn't worth lending their support to a journal that is dead in the eyes of a healthy portion of the field and that has quite obviously lowered their editorial standards. Those who have chosen to stay either have explicitly made the opposite calculus or just don't appear to care one way or the other. That's their right, of course, but we stand in judgment. (In reply to an email from us, one of the current board members wrote that "We should consider ourselves lucky that publishers deign to even touch our work." Wow.)

The bulk of the linguistics community has rallied behind Glossa and against Zombie Lingua, heeding the call to support the former (with our submissions and reviewing time) and to starve the latter. In responding to review requests from Zombie Lingua, a number of our colleagues have explicitly indicated their reasons for turning down the request. The editors have been duly forwarding some of these to Chris Pringle, the Executive Publisher of Zombie Lingua, who has responded by taking precious time out of his executive schedule to reply directly (and at some length) to our colleagues, relating Elsevier's "side" of the story of Lingua/Glossa.

Some of Pringle's messages have made their way to Glossa's (and Lingua's former) editor, Johan Rooryck. In the interests of transparency, Rooryck has posted this correspondence on his website, including Rooryck's subsequent exchanges with Pringle. Since the issues under discussion concern the reasons for and methods by which Rooryck and his editorial team resigned from Lingua, Rooryck has also included a point-by-point refutation of Pringle's allegations, as well as a comprehensive collection of Rooryck's correspondence with Elsevier in late 2015, both leading up to the editorial board's resignation and in its aftermath. (The current contents of this page on Rooryck's website have also been included at the end of this post.)

One has to wonder what Pringle thinks that he, Zombie Lingua, or Elsevier stand to gain from these personalized replies to review request rejections. Pringle must somehow believe that the hearts and minds of our colleagues can be won back by "correcting the record" on a dispute that he characterizes as being between a petulant journal editor and the journal's patronizing publisher. But, as Rooryck's documentation makes abundantly clear, this was an attempted negotiation between the full editorial board of the journal, entirely responsible for the vetting and shepherding of its content, and the journal's publisher, entirely responsible for charging readers too much for subscriptions to particularly-formatted versions of this content and authors too much for the apparent privilege of publishing individual articles in Open Access (with no compensatory discount on subscriptions, mind you – this is what has been properly called 'double-dipping').

In sum, there can be little doubt that Zombie Lingua continues to be the walking dead.

Current content of Johan Rooryck's Interaction with Elsevier page (as of 8/17/2017)

The 2017 Elsevier campaign

<li>My point-by-point, fact-checking-style <a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d58ca7_7a4c30ca5c704089b3be9e22e255a314.pdf">refutation</a> of allegations made by Elsevier's Executive Publisher Chris Pringle about the <i>Lingua/Glossa</i> transition in mails (e.g. 3 and 4 below) written to invited <i>Lingua</i> reviewers who decline to do reviews because of the transition to <i>Glossa.</i></li>
<li>My <a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d58ca7_14a134674cdf447ea4b968b76a4b68fa.pdf">correspondence</a> with Chris Pringle (Executive Publisher, Elsevier) regarding his message to Reviewer 2, 8 August 2017.</li>
<li><a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d58ca7_6fe6dd36d9c44569aaa2fc69a09230c1.pdf">Mail</a> from Chris Pringle (Executive Publisher, Elsevier) to Declining <i>Lingua Reviewer 2.</i></li>
<li><a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d58ca7_1bd7b8585ed349e4902dbeee0bd9425a.pdf">Mail</a> from Chris Pringle (Executive Publisher, Elsevier) to Declining <i>Lingua Reviewer 1.</i></li>
<li>An attempt to rewrite history in an <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/S0024-3841(17)30261-9">editorial</a> by Chris Pringle (Executive Publisher, Elsevier) for the publisher in <i>Lingua</i> 194 (July 2017), and my Facebook <a href="https://www.facebook.com/johan.rooryck/posts/1246316202163288">reply</a> to it.</i></li>
<li>My <a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d58ca7_131c763365864ce2b546165c4ece1cac.pdf">refutation of claims</a> made at ARCL 2017 regarding Elsevier's APC proposal to the <i>Lingua</i> editors.</i></li>

October--November 2015

<li>My <a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d58ca7_4e5180da60ba4c2a87a409a0f2e39a2d.pdf">mail to Elsevier</a> of 5 November 2015, requesting rectification of Tom Reller's (Vice President and Head of Global Corporate Relations, Elsevier) <a href="https://www.elsevier.com/connect/addressing-the-resignation-of-the-lingua-editorial-board">public statement</a> about the resignation of the <i>Lingua</i> editorial board on 4 November 2015.</li>
<li><a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d58ca7_9fe61d23b46f4566a31e9a7e2ee157ce.pdf">The correspondence</a> about the <i>Lingua</i> Editorial Board's collective resignation between Guido Vanden Wyngaerd, for the Board, and Chris Tancock (Senior Publisher, Elsevier), 27 October 2015.</i></li>
<li>My <a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d58ca7_a0a4e01ec09049f5883ea3e90207ab2b.pdf">letter of resignation</a> of 26 October 2015. The other editors sent similar letters.</i></li>
<li><a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d58ca7_9e13dfa160bc444385b069c1f7dc5749.pdf">Elsevier's response</a> of 16 October 2015, signed by Chris Tancock (Senior Publisher, Elsevier) to the <i>Lingua</i> editorial team's letter of renegotiation of 7 October 2015.</i></li>
<li><a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d58ca7_9c958ac8360748998d9b915cc944a306.pdf">Mail correspondence</a> with David Clark, Senior Vice President, Elsevier, of 16 October 2015, following up on our meeting at the <i>European Commission Workshop Alternative Open Access Publishing Models: Exploring New Territories in Scholarly Communication</i>. Brussels, 12 October 2015.</li>
<li>The <i>Lingua</i> editorial team's <a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/d58ca7_3205107c953f4d97894c1f92419ffbb1.pdf">letter of renegotiation</a> to Elsevier to publish <i>Lingua</i> in Open Access on (what is now known as) <i>Fair Open Access Principles</i>, 7 October 2015.</i></li>

Asleep at the wheel at Zombie Lingua?

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 20:00:00 +0000

[This post is co-authored by Eric Bakovic and me, cross-posted from Language Log.]

We have been following an ongoing story involving Zombie Lingua with great interest. For those unaware of it, and perhaps for those with only some awareness of it, here is what we currently know.

It will help to start by identifying the main characters in this story:

Islam Youssef, Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University College of Southeast Norway,
Zombie Lingua, the illegitimate continuation of the journal Lingua that Elsevier has propped up after Lingua's entire editorial team left to start the fair open access journal Glossa (in case you missed it, or need a refresher, see our first joint post with the story), and
Bassil Mashaqba and Anas Huneety, both of the Department of English Language and Literature at The Hashemite University in Jordan (and both of whom received their PhD from the University of Salford).

OK, here we go.

On Sept. 17, Youssef shared via Facebook a 13-page plagiarism complaint that he had submitted to Zombie Lingua’s editorial office a week earlier, with a copy of the message sent to the editor’s personal email address. Youssef notes in this post that he had yet to receive any kind of response, and that he had finally reached someone at Elsevier via their support center live chat. In a comment on the post, Youssef reports that the editor finally responded with a message saying that they take plagiarism “very seriously” and that they would investigate, very soon after which they sent Youssef’s complaint directly to Mashaqba & Huneety, giving them 30 days to respond to it.

Even though Youssef appears to be, quite understandably, rattled by this whole situation, he reports that he is cautiously optimistic about this most recent development. On the other hand, Youssef has very legitimate concerns about the extent of the problem that he has uncovered here. In a later comment on the Sept. 17 Facebook post, he reports with dismay his finding that Mashaqba & Huneety have published another article this month ("Emphatic segments and emphasis spread in rural Jordanian Arabic", Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 7(5), pp. 294-298) that may also involve some plagiarism of Youssef’s dissertation. Youssef appears to us to be taking appropriate steps to handle this larger problem, and we support him in his efforts. In the case of the ultimate resolution with Zombie Lingua and Mashaqba & Huneety, we share his optimism, and equally cautiously.

So, that’s where we’re currently at.

Our main concern here is with the conditions at Zombie Lingua that we believe have also significantly contributed to this particular situation. In a post just last month, one of us (Kai) went through the peer-reviewed articles that Zombie Lingua had published since January 2016 up to that point, and based on their submission receipt, revision receipt, and acceptance dates, concluded there is probably not much if any editorial oversight going on over at Zombie Lingua. This is not terribly surprising, given the make-up of the interim editorial board that Elsevier has cobbled together: it is quite simply not representative of the breadth of the field, which stands in sharp contrast with the stated mission of the journal.

The journal is devoted to the problems of general linguistics. Its aim is to present work of current interest in all areas of linguistics. Contributions are required to contain such general theoretical implications as to be of interest to any linguist, whatever their own specialisation.

[Side-note, perhaps for another time: several of the articles now appearing in Zombie Lingua seem to us to be quite outside the scope of this mission.]

Which brings us to Mashaqba & Huneety’s article-in-press. The original submission was received on November 16, 2015, revisions were received on May 14, 2016, and it was accepted on July 7, 2016. Lingua’s prior (and Glossa’s current) editor-in-chief, Johan Rooryck, has stated for the record that his editorial team did not handle this submission. Rooryck has further explained to us that unsolicited manuscripts submitted in mid-November 2015 and later were left for the new team to handle, to ensure some continuity in the review process. (Rooryck’s editorial team had officially announced its imminent departure in October 2015.)

So, the new editorial team sent Mashaqba & Huneety’s submission out for review, shepherded it through revisions, and accepted it. How was the plagiarism not detected at any point in this process? A big part of the answer to this question, we believe, is the lack of a proper phonology editor. Not one of the members of the current board can be described as someone who is current in phonology, someone who would know (or know of) the right people to ask to review any submission — reviewers who would be in the best possible position to ferret these problems out before they reach this stage (in case the editors themselves are not).

The conclusion we draw from this fiasco is that Zombie Lingua is limping blindly along, and that linguists with the right (that is, wrong) incentives may feel reasonably justified in thinking that their submissions to Zombie Lingua will receive little if any thoughtful review or editorial push-back. This has long been the accusation hurled at so-called “predatory journals”, and it is clearly now available for hurling at a high-cost subscription journal brought to you by a “reputable” publisher.

However, so long as there are sharp eyes and brave souls like Islam Youssef in our community — and so long as Zombie Lingua’s editorial team and Elsevier do the right thing in response to complaints like his — the push-back needed in cases like this one at least stands a small chance of being successful.

Prerequisites

Sat, 27 Aug 2016 20:00:00 +0000

[These are some thoughts as I’m getting ready to teach our first semester graduate introduction to semantics. This fall, I’m also serving as acting Graduate Program Director, while Sabine is on sabbatical leave. So, I figured I should write down some points that I often address in sermons in introductory classes. Let me know if you have comments or disagree with anything.]

Any scientific topic of sufficient theoretical complexity and with interesting empirical breadth cannot be taught from first principles. Teaching and learning of such topics is a messy affair, something that it’s important to get used to. Many of these thoughts are also relevant when one is confronted with a new article at the cutting edge of research or when one is listening to a research presentation.

Ideally, one might start from what is common ground among the students in the class (or one’s readers). But especially when people with different backgrounds and diverse interests come together, there’s actually very little that is truly common ground. So, what to do? One strategy is to pretend there’s more common ground than there really is and let people catch up as fast they can.

Presupposition Accommodation

In a way, when you’re new to a topic, you’re in a kind of situation that is familiar from the study of “presupposition accommodation” (I wrote a survey-ish article about this a while back). Imagine you enter an elevator and two people you vaguely know are in the middle of a conversation. One says “she’s in town for a conference.” The other: “we should talk to her about epistemic modality in Bulgarian”. And so on. As an eavesdropper, you can learn a lot from such conversations even if you never figure out who “she” is. Your task is to piece together what the common ground of the conversation is, without being explicitly informed about everything that’s being taken for granted. In classes and reading new work, that’s very often the case as well. Of course, while in the elevator it might be a faux pas to just barge in and ask who they are talking about, in classes it’s OK to ask clarifying questions about things that seem to be taken for granted. Maybe the question will be deflected and deferred to a later time, a conversation outside class or a TA tutorial, but at least it’s fine to register that you’re not entirely on board with the assumptions being made.

It’s important to get comfortable with not understanding everything, working to figure out the essence of what’s going on, and patiently and actively waiting for the pieces to drop into place. Yes, it’s often disorienting but if you keep at it, the picture will become clearer over time and tools and concepts will become second nature eventually.

“Stupidity”

In other words, you need to become used to feeling “stupid”. I mean this in an entirely non-disparaging sense: obviously, you’re not stupid. What it is is that you’re not completely understanding a complex topic. Of course, that is in fact the permanent condition of science. The whole point of science is to work at things we don’t understand and make some progress towards understanding, but that progress will then result in even more things we don’t understand. Answers to questions simply beget more questions. On my office door, I have a print out of a short article on this very topic.

When you’re in an almost perpetual state of progressive ignorance, and if you’re always surrounded by other super-smart people, it is very easy to lose sight of the inevitability of the feelings of “stupidity”. Instead, one easily starts to actually believe that one is inadequate and really is stupid compared to the others. This phenomenon is very widespread. I suffer from it myself. It’s important to be aware of it and if possible, turn it into a positive power. Here are two ways of thinking about it:

“In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” (Bertrand Russell, “The Triumph of Stupidity”, 1933). Russell’s observation has been substantiated in psychological research and is known as the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”.
Another term for the dynamic is “Imposter Syndrome”. At the last LSA Summer Institute, Penny Eckert and Monica Macaulay gave a presentation on the syndrome and the slides are available. Here is a good blog post with further links on this set of issues.

Coping with boredom

At the other end of the spectrum, a class may at times underchallenge you. You may already (think you) know everything or the pace is such that anything that is new to you takes very little effort to pick up. So, you’re bored. There are three strategies to cope with such boredom and it may make sense to mix these strategies depending on your energy levels, the semester schedule, and what else you have to do.

Coast: You might decide to just take it easy for a while: just do the little that is needed to stay with the class and devote your energies to other tasks. This is legitimate. Faculty may choose to do this as well at times. It can’t be the dominant strategy, though, if it means that you’re not moving forward in your chosen field.

If the material appears too easy for you, there are two ways of deepening your engagement and thereby making it appropriately hard again.

Going meta: figure out how you would teach the material. The easiest way to do this is to actually teach it: in groups with your fellow students, some of whom probably find the material more challenging than you do, work on explaining things a different way from the way it was done in class. And even if you don’t have such an early outlet for your pedagogical insights, presumably in a few years you will definitely have to teach and it’s good to have thought about it beforehand. Pedagogical insights are also very useful for writing papers because the deeper your penetration of the topic is and the better you understand what it takes to convey its intricacies, the clearer your prose will be.

Deep dive: any topic has fractal levels of complexity. We may skate over that in class but you can go deeper. Find current research in the area and read it. Think about using other methodologies to study the relevant phenomena: what is the language acquisition angle on the topic? Is there relevant psycholinguistic work? What is the cross-linguistic picture? How do syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology work together? If you find anything that grabs your interest, pursue it, talk to colleagues and faculty about it. Rinse and repeat.

Checking on the zombies

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 20:00:00 +0000

Prompted by an exchange with Brooke Larson on twitter, I decided it was time to check on the health of everyone’s favorite zombie, the journal Lingua, whose editorial team defected en masse to start the open access journal Glossa. Since January this year, Zombie Lingua has been edited by “Interim Editor-in-chief” Harry Whitaker. Since January 1, the journal has published an impressive number of peer-reviewed articles: 49 in total (there are some others, like introductions to special issues, that have no peer review information). I inspected the date information on those articles. Here’s the upshot:

all of the articles were first submitted before January 2016. So, there have not been any articles published that were submitted to Zombie Lingua in its new incarnation.
36 articles (73%) were accepted by the old team and just published in 2016.
13 articles (27%) were accepted by the new team after a revised version (using the feedback from the old team) was submitted.
10 of the 13 articles (77%) accepted by the new team were accepted on the very day they were received, so with little or no editorial oversight. In fact, on one day (March 31), seven articles were submitted and accepted on the spot. A banner day.

I think it’s safe to say that we have no evidence that Zombie Lingua is alive.

S&P Early Access

Wed, 27 Apr 2016 20:00:00 +0000

[Reposted from the S&P Editors Blog]

Visitors to S&P’s homepage will see our newest feature in action. Accepted papers for which we have a LaTeX source file will, with the authors’ permission, now immediately be published in an “early access” version. They will already be assigned their final DOI, so they can be linked and referred to as officially published. This way they can be listed on CVs with all their final citation details (with the sole exception of missing page numbers, since we won’t know how many pages the article has until the final typeset version).

This year’s volume of S&P already shapes up to be epic. We invite you to browse through the amazing collection of articles that our authors have entrusted to S&P.

Echoes of Eco

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 19:00:00 +0000

[Sorry, couldn’t resist that title.]

My favorite classes at the Hittorf-Gymnasium in Münster were Math, Chemistry, Latin, and Philosophy. My philosophy teacher, Herr Ledwig, in particular, was formative. We read lots of seminal European philosophy (Aristotle, Descartes, Vico, Weber, …). I spent a lot of time in the public library looking at and borrowing plenty of stuff that was a true challenge. I struggled through the writings of Benjamin, Adorno, and Marcuse. When I graduated and enrolled at the University of Münster, I decided not to become the mathematician that I had once thought I was going to be. I became an English major with Philosophy and History of Arts as minors.

Around that time, in 1982, Eco’s The Name of the Rose appeared in the German translation and was an instant sensation. I devoured the book. I was immediately and completely obsessed with everything that had to do with the book. Aristotle, medieval history, medieval philosophy, James Bond, semiotics, aesthetics, Latin, Greek, whatever. I taught myself enough Italian to read Eco’s thesis on medieval aesthetics. I read his Theory of Semiotics. I read Peirce. I took Professor Schepers’ classes on medieval logic at the Leibniz Research Institute, where we read Ockham and William of Sherwood in the original. I read Quine’s Word and Object.

When I spent a year at Cambridge University as an exchange student and English major, I dutifully did my work on English Romantic poetry and on the modern/post-modern novel, but really I was finally discovering my future profession: the study of semantics within general linguistics. This was then cemented when I returned to Germany and switched universities to study in Cologne. There, the revelations were Professor Samuelsdorff’s seminar on the recently circulating manuscript of Keenan & Faltz’s Boolean Semantics for Natural Language and my independent reading of Barwise & Cooper on generalized quantifiers and of Horn’s thesis on The Semantics of Logical Operators in English. I had found my calling. In a seminar on Aristotle and the medieval Islamic scholars, I discovered the Islamic logicians’ work on exceptives and their correspondences in medieval logic. This directly led to my first generals paper at UMass a couple of years later (which then became my first journal article in the new journal Natural Language Semantics).

Just before I came to UMass, in 1986, I attended a summer school in Munich, where I took classes with Robin Cooper and Roland Hausser. At that time, there was a conference in town where Eco gave a talk on “Fakes”. Afterwards, I went down to ask him a question. I shook his hand and was barely able to speak, completely star-struck.

Looking back on this story, there’s a lot of serendipity and luck (I can’t believe I got into the UMass program to learn semantics from Angelika, Barbara, and Emmon). But, there’s also Eco. He was simply pivotal in helping me find my passions. Rest in peace, Maestro.

MIT Support for Glossa

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 19:00:00 +0000

[Reproducing a statement published this morning in the MIT Linguistics Newsletter:]

Below is a statement from the MIT Linguistics Faculty on open access and the new journal Glossa. We’re following our colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Similar statements are being considered on other campuses. For background, you can consult this post at Language Log and a statement from Glossa’s editor-in-chief Johan Rooryck. [Update: See now also a similar statement from linguists across the University of California system.]

MIT Linguistics Faculty Statement of Support for Glossa

We, the undersigned linguistics faculty of MIT, state our strong support for the principle of open access to scholarly communication, as affirmed in the Open Access Policy of the MIT Faculty. In the context of this commitment, we also state our strong support for the editorial team that recently left the journal Lingua and started the fair open access journal Glossa. We firmly expect that Glossa will inherit and exceed the quality and reputation of the earlier journal. We applaud MIT's support for the Open Library of Humanities, the organization that, together with the LingOA initiative, is underwriting Glossa. We pledge to further the aims of open access in our actions as editors, reviewers, and authors.

Adam Albright
Sylvain Bromberger
Noam Chomsky
Michel DeGraff
Kai von Fintel
Edward Flemming
Suzanne Flynn
Danny Fox
Martin Hackl
James Harris
Irene Heim
Sabine Iatridou
Michael Kenstowicz
Samuel Jay Keyser
Shigeru Miyagawa
Wayne O'Neil
David Pesetsky
Norvin Richards
Roger Schwarzschild
Donca Steriade
Kenneth Wexler

Beyond Open Access

Tue, 05 Jan 2016 19:00:00 +0000

These are times of upheaval in scholarly communication. One thing that seems clear is that open access will prevail: since most scientific research is directly and indirectly funded through public money, it is simply inescapable that the public should have open access to the results of the research. And it is also inescapable that there needs to be careful stewardship of that public money and that it should not be syphoned off to support the large profit margin of legacy publishers. So, let’s accept that open access and fair pricing are non-negotiable and inevitable. What’s next?

What made open access feasible was the advent of the internet and the possibility to disseminate research papers quickly and without access controls. Many of us make our manuscripts available on disciplinary sites such as LingBuzz, the Semantics Archive, PhilPapers, and so on. In many ways, those sites are the primary way that new results first reach the community.

Beyond that, what else do we really need? Isn’t posting papers on such archives all that’s required to keep the engines of collaborative scientific progress well-oiled? Do we need peer review, do we need journals?

Since I am the co-founding editor of a staunchly peer-reviewed journal, with a rather draconian rejection rate, you might think that my answer will be unambiguous, but in fact, I don’t think these are easy questions nowadays.

What do journals actually offer? Here are the main considerations:

peer and editorial feedback to authors
curation: selecting and highlighting the best work
copy-editing
type-setting
income for publisher

The main costs for running a journal are in the latter three categories. The editorial work and the work of the peer reviewers is typically pro bono, covered by their employers. Some journals may pay the editor a small stipend or expense account, but that is the exception in linguistics at least.

Is it all worth it?

Authors at S&P seem to value the intensive and extensive feedback they receive. Is there any other mechanism by which authors can reliably receive such feedback? Experiments with open peer review have not taken off, at least in linguistics, but maybe it’s worth a try. One might hope that authors, especially junior ones, get ample feedback from their mentors and peers before a paper is injected into the publication pipeline. But judging by what gets submitted to S&P, I’m not so sanguine.

Do we need curation? If every paper is available in the disciplinary archives, how do readers decide which are worth the investment of a day of intense study, or at least an hour of cursory reading? Will established authors have a lock on the attention of potential readers?

Do tenure & promotion committees need the validation that comes from a paper having been published in a reputable journal? Shouldn’t they simply go by the considered opinion of the external letter writers and maybe by the objective citation record (keeping in mind, again, that much of the scientific communication happens through disciplinary archives and other ways of exchanging papers and drafts, so that citation archaeology should be maximally permissive, that is, more like Google Scholar than Web of Science).

Do we need copy-editing and type-setting? When we started S&P, it was clear to us that a new-fangled open access journal needed to have a very professional “look” to its articles. That together, with my frankly out-of-control obsession with typographic precision, lead to a very labor-intensive production process. Our competitor journals outsource this step to companies that do not have disciplinary expertise, for the most part. They also don’t necessarily offer copy-editing at all. The typographic results are also somewhat problematic. So, S&P can be proud of its presentation. But it is a major pain-point nevertheless. More on this later.

Now, these aspects of journals are not inextricably linked. We could easily unbundle them. And I think we should. We should experiment with a good number of models and see which ones work and which ones don’t. We may end up with a much more interesting and fruitful landscape of publication avenues.

Here are some of the options I see:

We could have “journals” that simply are listings of articles in the archives that the editors consider highlight-worthy. Something like the curated playlists on music streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music. Don’t know what to listen to among the millions of songs? Let an Apple Editor make the choice for you. Don’t know what papers to read among the hundreds on LingBuzz? Let our editorial board guide you.

A considerable step up from that are “overlay journals” (two examples). Here, authors post their manuscripts to an archive and also submit them to the overlay journal, which conducts standard peer-review, asks for revisions, and, perhaps but not necessarily, takes charge of copy-editing and typesetting. Accepted articles are updated on the archive and the journal links to the archived article from its table of contents. I think this is a very promising model.

Another model is to slim down peer-review to the barebones: simply make sure that an article isn’t complete nonsense and then publish basically everything. This is a model of several open access journals. Typically, there are production costs financed through author publication charges. Colin Philips reports positively on the experiences editing such a journal.

There are other possible recombinations of various ingredients of the journal system. I am very excited about the possibilities.

In the spirit of rethinking all aspects of scholarly communication, even a now firmly established journal like S&P should be nimble and consider ways of making things (even) better. Here are some thoughts and questions (my own, not yet discussed with the other members of the editorial team):

How can we address the major pain-points in the production process? We do not outsource to disciplinarily naive companies, but rely on graduate student labor. This is not the most time-efficient way of doing things, even if the end-product is superior. If linguists were as proficient as mathematicians or computer scientists in the use of LaTeX, we could probably reduce the time from acceptance to publication, but that doesn’t appear to be a realistic scenario.
I think we might highlight articles that have been accepted in a way that reduces the pain of waiting for the official publication. Maybe, S&P’s homepage should link to the author’s final version of accepted papers right away (perhaps even with an assigned DOI). This way, they could be listed on CVs as published, for all intents and purposes.
I’d like to think about acknowledging the work of reviewers more openly. Perhaps, reviewers should have the option of being named as having helped a particular paper in the process to publication.

What other things should we think about?

Zombie Lingua Recruitment

Mon, 14 Dec 2015 19:00:00 +0000

My sources say that Elsevier is now actively trying to recruit scholars for the editorial team of Zombie Lingua (see these Language Log posts for the background: "Lingua is dead. Long live Glossa!", Lingua Disinformation"). Here’s a redacted sample of what they are sending to people:

Subject: Editorial Position Opportunity

Dear Professor […]

First please let me introduce myself as the […] at Elsevier responsible for the Social Science Journals, including our Linguistics portfolio.

I hope you do not mind me contacting you out of the blue like this, but as you may be aware we are currently looking for a new editorial team to head up the journal, Lingua. In discussions regarding this your name was suggested as a potential candidate to be part of this team. If this is something you would be interested in considering and would like to discuss this further, with no obligations, then please let me know. I would be more than happy to provide more details of the role and responsibilities.

Thank you for your time in considering this proposal. I look forward to your reply and hope to discuss this further with you in the near future.

Best regards […]

Needless to say, I’m hoping that the community is sufficiently immunized by now and that Elsevier will fail to attract linguists to stand up a zombie version of Lingua, which would not have any legitimacy as a successor to the journal’s proud tradition. The true successor to Lingua is Glossa.

By the way: Glossa is now open for business. The first few submissions have already been made.

Lingua Disinformation

Thu, 26 Nov 2015 19:00:00 +0000

Linguists today received a misleading email from Elsevier sent to everyone who has ever submitted to or reviewed for Lingua, the journal whose editorial board has decided to not work with Elsevier anymore and restart the journal as the open-access journal Glossa. Here is Elsevier’s email:

Dear Lingua Authors and Reviewers

As I am sure you are aware, as of the end of December 2015 the current Lingua Senior Editorial team will be standing down from their roles on the journal. Together this team and the Publisher would like to reassure you that while still in post they will continue their work for Lingua as they have always done during their tenure.

Further information regarding the handling of papers from January 2016 onwards will be sent in due course, but should you have any queries or concerns in the meantime please do not hesitate to contact us via the ‘Contact’ button on the journal homepage or via the following email address: lingua@elsevier.com .

My colleagues and I would also like to take this opportunity to reaffirm that we remain totally committed to the publication of Lingua as a quality journal serving the field of linguistics and look forward to supporting the journal and the linguistics community for many years to come.

Best Regards

Ann Corney, Publishing Director, Applied Social Sciences, Elsevier Ltd

There has been a lot of puzzlement over this message. Some comments below, but first a message from the interim editors of the successor journal Glossa, which I have been asked to help disseminate:

Dear colleagues,

Those among you who have been authors and/or reviewers for Lingua were sent a message today by Elsevier, and you might wonder about the journal, Glossa, to be set up by the very same editorial team which has contributed to the high reputation of Lingua in the past.

As of the end of December 2015, the current executive and associated editors of Lingua will stand down. The next day, they will be in charge of Glossa. Until that date, the undersigned will be in charge as interim editors of Glossa, (backed up by the entire former editorial board of Lingua which already resigned in October).

In that capacity, we would like to reassure you that Glossa will pick up where Lingua left off. We would also like to draw your attention to the fact that any author has the right to withdraw their submission from any journal as long as the copyright forms have not been signed.

We are currently working on the website (including an online submission system etc.) for Glossa, and will come back to you as soon as it is operational. In the meantime, you can send your questions to both of us.

All best wishes, Waltraud Paul and Guido Vanden Wyngaerd, interim editors of Glossa wpaul@ehess.fr & guido.vandenwyngaerd@arts.kuleuven.be

Some comments:

I would like to reiterate that despite the desperate rhetoric in the last sentence of Ms. Corney’s email, there is no way at all that whatever zombie journal Elsevier manages to keep running under the venerable name Lingua will have any moral right to be seen as the continuation of Lingua. Instead, Glossa is the rightful continuation.
I also reiterate my call to the community not to work with Elsevier in propping up Zombie Lingua. Instead, get ready to support Glossa once it’s fully running in January.
Lastly, authors with manuscripts currently under submission to Lingua should consider their options; please contact the interim editors of Glossa with any questions about that.

[In related news, the Open Library of Humanities announced today that in addition to Glossa, three other journals will flip from for-profit models to open access in 2016.]

Lingua Roundup

Wed, 04 Nov 2015 19:00:00 +0000

In case you’re not glued to social media 24/7, you may have missed some of the coverage of the Lingua → Glossa Affair.

Media coverage after the early Inside Higher Ed article has included:

a statement of support of the Lingua team by Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities
an article at Ars Technica, with some rather uninformed trolling in the comments
an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education
an article in Wired

Yesterday, an Elsevier PR blog posted a mendacious “clarification”. In addition to some of the comments on that post, you can look in other places for the truth:

Martin Eve, the founder of the Open Library of Humanities which will host the new incarnation of Lingua, has posted “Clarifying a few facts for Elsevier and their response to Lingua”
Mike Taylor has posted a scathing reply to Elsevier

Elsevier claims that it founded Lingua, that it therefore has the right to the name, that the proposed open access charge of 400 Euros per article is not sustainable. Obviously, Lingua was founded by linguists not by Elsevier. The charge is almost certainly sustainable (in fact, Elsevier has journals that subsist on such a charge). And there are other lies in their statement. (By the way, the PR spokesman is the same person who made some rather revealing statements about women in STEM last year, as pointed out by Curt Rice, linguist and the president of Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences.)

I stand by my call for community action: support the Glossa team, do not agree to help Elsevier stand up a sham Zombie Lingua.

To end with a quote from Mike Taylor:

You know what’s not sustainable? Dragging around the carcass of a legacy barrier-based publisher, with all its expensive paywalls, authentication systems, Shibboleth/Athens/Kerberos integration, lawyers, PR departments, spin-doctors, lobbyists, bribes to politicians, and of course 37.3% profit margins.

The biggest problem with legacy publishers? They’re just a waste of money.

Lingua → Glossa

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 19:00:00 +0000

There is exciting news from the open access revolution.

[Previously:] A few years ago, I put up some relevant short notes, focussing to some extent on Elsevier’s particularly egregious enmity towards open access: “Attach from big money publishers” and “News from the open access revolution”. Especially relevant is Elsevier’s rear-guard action against open access mandates such as MIT’s, discussed in an informative article by my former colleague Richard Holton. I also published my personal open access policy. In the mean time, the Elsevier Boycott started by our colleagues in mathematics has 15,286 signatories. The fully open access journal Semantics and Pragmatics that I co-founded with David Beaver is thriving and is now the second full journal of the Linguistic Society of America (alongside the flagship journal Language, which has a one year delayed open access policy).

This past month, our colleagues on the editorial team of the venerable journal Lingua proposed to the journal’s publisher Elsevier that Lingua should become a “fair open access journal”. It would charge reasonable, not excessive, article fees, which would be payed by a new consortium, with the result that the journal would be free to readers and authors. Not surprisingly, given Elsevier’s profiteering nature, Elsevier did not agree. In response, the entire editorial team resigned and will start a new open access journal with the same focus and scope as Lingua. Elsevier insisted that they have the rights to the name Lingua (even though the name has historic value and reputation that was created by linguists and not by a publishing company). So, the new journal will be called Glossa, but in the eyes of the community it is the rightful continuation of Lingua. Elsevier will try to start their own new journal, which they will name Lingua, usurping a name that has a lot of associated goodwill because of the hard work of the editors over decades. To me, that is a despicable insult to the linguistics community. A colleague suggested the alternative name “Zombie Lingua” for the Elsevier project, which I hope will stick.

There’s various hopes I have for the near future:

Finishing Lingua’s current business

The current editors of Lingua will finish up their current business over the next few months and will officially step down on December 31. I think the community should support them as best as possible, particularly by finishing any outstanding reviews. Any authors with work under submission to Lingua should strongly consider withdrawing these submissions and resubmitting them to Glossa as soon as that new journal is open for business (which is projected to be in January).

Supporting Glossa

Everyone should support Glossa: submit your best work to it, agree to review for it, help it get ranked and recognized across the academy.

Do not support Zombie Lingua

It won’t come as a surprise from a veteran Elsevier boycotter like me that I think that the community should not assist Elsevier in standing up a new journal that usurps the Lingua goodwill. Do not serve on the editorial team, do not submit articles, do not review for them. I certainly won’t.

I welcome discussion of my recommendations. For further information, there is a largely accurate article at Inside Higher Ed and there is the website of the Ling-OA initiative, which the Lingua/Glossa team is working with.

Treat your reviewers well

Tue, 13 Jan 2015 19:00:00 +0000

S&P asks its reviewers to overcome the discipline’s culture of procrastination and supply reviews within a default of 4 weeks (sometimes more for especially complex or long papers). We try to repay reviewers in two ways that we consider best practices:

Reviewers are copied on editorial decisions. They are sent the editor’s feedback to the author and copies of all the reviews.
Reviewers are notified when a paper they worked on for us is published.

Neither practice is as widespread as it should be. In fact, sometimes when we have a new editorial team member, they are skeptical about sharing the entire editorial feedback with the reviewers. It doesn’t take long for them to change their minds when we get the usual enthusiastic feedback from reviewers.

This morning we published a new paper and I spent a few minutes notifying the five reviewers that had worked on various iterations of the article. I just got this response: “Thanks for letting me know. It’s nice of you to do this for reviewers. I wish other journals would follow you too …”

Keep reviewers in the loop

Wed, 03 Dec 2014 19:00:00 +0000

S&P makes a point of keeping reviewers informed about the fate of papers they review, copying them on the editorial decision, forwarding the other reviews, and letting them know if and when the paper gets published. We think that reviewers deserve to be kept in the loop. I get annoyed when I work on reviews for other journals and am not at all kept in the loop.

At this time of the year, I begin to feel the same about promotion and tenure letters I wrote over the summer. I find it irksome that departments do not let me know what happened to the cases I wrote for. Why is this not common practice?

Apple Watch Purchase Prevention

Sun, 30 Nov 2014 19:00:00 +0000

This is the Apple Watch edition of my new Purchase Prevention Program, trying to keep me from early adopting.

Smart watches are going to be the new hotness, especially once the Apple Watch is out. I’m going to stick with my trusted basic Citizen watch for a while longer. Here’s what would persuade me:

standalone functioning, does not need a phone nearby (don’t want to lug anything else along when I’m on long runs)
robustness so it can withstand movement and sweat when I’m exercising
full set of GPS, altimeter, pulse rate, etc sensors so it can track my runs and every day activities
an elegant stylish design that doesn’t scream “nerd”
displays just the time and date in analog form in its default appearance
displays an alert when there’s a message from a VIP connection
excellent speech recognition so I can respond to messages on the spot
functionality to take voice memos on the go
can send music to Bluetooth earphones

I suspect that the third generation Apple watch will get close to this package but perhaps Garmin, Fitbit, UP or the like will beat them to it. In the meantime, I hope all the early adopters buy loads of early models so that R&D continues at full speed. Ping me when my dream watch is on the market.

A guide for the perplexed author in semantics

Thu, 13 Nov 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Note: at the upcoming LSA annual meeting in Portland, I will be part of a session about the publication process. My role will be to talk about open access in linguistics. I just remembered that I had lying around a draft guide to publishing articles. So, here’s the draft. I’d be very grateful for feedback so I can improve this document but also figure out what makes sense to talk about in Portland.

You have written something that you think other people should read. You want the input of other experts. You want your ideas to make their way through the discipline. You want the excellence of your ideas to reflect positively on you. How best to achieve those goals? What follows are my recommendations. These are my opinions only, but I have reached them over my 25 years in the discipline. I hope that some might find this subjective guide useful.

My main prescription is: disseminate early, often, and relentlessly.

Make your work available

As soon as you have a handout or slides that you’ve used for an official talk, put that on your website. When you have a draft paper, put it on your website. In each case, also point people at it through whatever networks you are part of (your department, contacts at other institutions, your Facebook, Twitter, Google+ connections).

Post to repositories

By the time you have a revised draft that is ready for submission, it’s time to also share it via disciplinary repositories (LingBuzz, Semantics Archive, PhilPapers).

Excursus: Why not stop here? Why submit to peer-reviewed journals? At some point in the future, we might reach a system where you post something to the disciplinary repository, peer review occurs in the open, and you revise your paper accordingly. The paper gets rated and assessed by various metrics (likes, number of comments, number of downloads, number of citation). We are not there yet. And to be honest, I am a firm believer in high quality peer review of the old-fashioned kind. If and when we move to the kind of free-for-all I just sketched, I’m worried that quality work from young and hereto-forth unknown authors will not get the attention it deserves. Of course, whatever the superstars put in the repository will get all the attention it deserves (and more). But the expert feedback curation from good editors and peer reviewers of good journals makes it much more likely that the discipline will be exposed to the merits of new work even if it doesn’t come from the superstars.

So, yes, submit to peer-reviewed journals. I hope they’re here to stay.

Choosing a journal

When it comes time to submit your work to a journal, the first consideration in choosing a journal is whether it is an appropriate and adequately high profile venue for the work. Journals differ along various additional dimensions: quality of peer review and editorial feedback, speediness of the review and decision process, respect for author’s rights (including the right to make available preprints and postprints), quality (and existence) of copy-editing, quality (and existence) of professional typesetting (including whether they accept LaTeX source rather than insisting on a less sophisticated format), whether or not they publish an online-first/early version of a paper as soon as it is ready, speediness of publication of print version. If you are new-ish to the field, you should ask for advice from trusted mentors.

Don’t let them lock up your work

Many journals lock up your work behind a toll access barrier. You should attempt to mitigate that lock up, because it is in your best interest for your work to be as easily accessible by as many readers as possible. It is imperative that you carefully read the publishing agreement that the publisher will ask you to sign. Make sure to understand in detail which rights to your own work you are being asked to sign away. In fact, it makes a lot of sense to include this in your decision of where to submit. There is a handy service that lets you explore the policies journals have with respect to your rights as an author: Sherpa/RoMEO.

a. Unless forced otherwise by the publisher, keep the early versions of your work (sometimes called preprints) on your website and in disciplinary and/or institutional repositories, but add to the downloads all the bibliographic detail of the published version.

b. Unless the standard publisher’s agreement already gives you the right to provide open access to your final manuscript (sometimes called postprints; the version you prepared for final submission after receiving peer review and editorial feedback, but before copy-editing and publisher’s typesetting), try to insist on that right. You can try to make your signing of the agreement contingent on the publisher accepting an author’s amendment. See the SPARC Addendum.

c. An increasing number of publishers offer to make your paper open access if you pay them a fee. This is called an author-pays hybrid open access model. There is a suspicion that publishers charge excessive author fees (“double dipping” since they still rake in subscription fees for a journal that only contains sporadic open access articles). Some universities subsidize such fees. Fees can also sometimes be charged to grants that funded the research reported in the published article.

d. There are some journals that are entirely open access and charge author fees to fund their operations (this is often called gold open access). This is an unusual model in linguistics and at this point pretty much irrelevant to publication in semantics. Some universities subsidize such fees. Fees can also sometimes be charged to grants that funded the research reported in the published article.

e. There are some journals that are entirely open access and DO NOT charge author fees. These are typically funded through institutional support (this is sometimes called platinum open access). Semantics & Pragmatics is one such journal. Others in adjacent areas are The Philosophers’ Imprint and the Australasian Journal of Logic.

Don’t get involved with edited volumes

Sometimes you might be asked to contribute your work as a chapter in an edited volume or handbook. I have done this (sometimes after having a hard time getting a paper published in a peer-reviewed journal, sometimes because it felt like an easy way to get something out, sometimes because I felt an obligation to the editors). I recommend against it. Edited volumes are a poor vehicle for cutting edge work. They are not as rigorously reviewed as top journals. They are not recognized by promotion & tenure committees as particularly impressive. They often take an enormously long time to get published, often more than even the most egregiously slow journals. Don’t do it.

Any questions or comments? Comment below. Email me. Tweet in response to the announcement of this post on twitter. Leave a Facebook comment.

MUST and SHOULD figured out

Wed, 12 Nov 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Those of us trying to figure out the meaning of deontic modals, especially the distinction between weak and strong necessity, should just pack in and go on vacation. There’s an official RFC¹ that settles the issue.

Scott Bradner, all around internet wizard at Harvard, wrote RFC 2119 “Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels” in 1997. It has this definitive pronouncement on the difference between strong and weak necessity expressions:

MUST: This word, or the terms “REQUIRED” or “SHALL”, mean that the definition is an absolute requirement of the specification.
SHOULD: This word, or the adjective “RECOMMENDED”, mean that there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a particular item, but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before choosing a different course.

Exercise for the reader: do any current semantic proposals mesh with this official pronouncement on how must and should differ?

“A Request for Comments (RFC) is a publication of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Society, the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the Internet.” (Wikipedia) ↩︎

The art and craft of semantics

Thu, 30 Oct 2014 20:00:00 +0000

The Art and Craft of Semantics is a Festschrift for Irene Heim that students, colleagues, and friends presented to her yesterday, October 30, 2014, on the occasion of her 60th birthday. I have two co-authored contributions in the collection:

The definiteness paper is a brief report on a rumored account that’s been floating around for a while. I hope there’ll be follow-up work. The modal comparison paper is a very short plea for Irene’s help with some puzzles that are simply too hard for Angelika and me.

Happy birthday, Irene!

DSpace statistics

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 20:00:00 +0000

The MIT Libraries just made available a new website displaying various statistics about our Open Access DSpace repository. I have three papers in that archive. Here are the download counts for those papers:

And here is a graph with the cumulative download count over time:

I can’t compare this to the download numbers that these articles get at the official publisher sites because publishers don’t seem to share those numbers with their authors. But it makes clear that DSpace is a legitimate distribution venue and that I should probably make as much of my work available through it as is feasible. Stay tuned.

Sun, 27 Apr 2014 20:00:00 +0000

Going through boxes of old stuff, I came across the April 12, 1988 telegram(!) that told me that I had been accepted into the UMass PhD program in linguistics:

Fruits and veggies would be healthy

Mon, 07 Apr 2014 20:00:00 +0000

A famous example by Sperber & Wilson shows the context dependency of conversational inferences:

He: Will you have some coffee?

She: Coffee would keep me awake.

Depending on whether one surmises that she would like to stay awake, one can infer either a positive or negative answer to whether she would like some coffee.

The April 7, 2014 issue of the “Zits” cartoon gives us a new illustration:

“Only”

Sat, 29 Mar 2014 20:00:00 +0000

In today’s Boston Globe baseball preview section: “Jake Stahl (1912), Ed Barrow (1918), Terry Francona (2004), and John Farrell (2013) are the only Red Sox managers to win the World Series in their first season.”

Hmm. Yeah, no. The Red Sox have had 44 managers in their history, so when 4 of them win the World Series in their first season, does that really merit an “only”? I mean, what is the expected frequency of a manager winning a world series in their first season? Almost certainly a lot less than 4 in 44.

But the more astonishing fact is that of the 8 World Series wins the Red Sox have had, half of them were by rookie managers. (And one of those, Francona, won another one. So, 5 trophies belong to managers who won one in their first season.) That’s definitely not an “only”.

Every department needs a publication advisor

Thu, 27 Mar 2014 20:00:00 +0000

Every academic department anywhere should designate one of their members to be Publication Advisor. This will be someone who, with the help of their local librarians and whoever else can be helpful, informs themselves about the current state of scholarly publishing. They will learn about their institution’s Open Access Policy (if it exists; otherwise, they may initiate discussions about putting such a policy in place). They will learn to read publication agreements and spot potential pitfalls. They will make themselves familiar with the practices of the leading journals in their discipline. They will look for discipline-appropriate ways of publishing that will give readers open access to research results.

When a member of the department has a manuscript to submit, they can consult the Publication Advisor in their search for a good venue. Throughout the submission and publication process, they can ask the Publication Advisor for advice.

Some universities have staff members who try to fill that role for the entire university. I think that a more local, embedded approach is needed to make progress on the ground.

This idea was prompted by the latest skirmish in the war between scholars and mercenary publishers: http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2014/03/27/attacking-academic-values/ (Nature playing hardball with Duke over Duke’s OA Policy).

Language Science Press

Wed, 15 Jan 2014 19:00:00 +0000

It’s still early days but the open-access revolution in linguistics continues. Stefan Müller and Martin Haspelmath, with seed funding from the German Science Foundation (DFG), have started an open access monograph press in linguistics called Language Science Press. E-books will be free to authors and readers. There will be a print-on-demand option as well. There are several series planned, including one on “Topics at the Grammar-Discourse Interface”, edited by Philippa Cook, Anke Holler and Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen. I have enthusiastically agreed to be on the editorial board of this series. You can support the venture in many ways. Sign up at http://hpsg.fu-berlin.de/OALI/sign/.

My Academic Genealogy – Part 2

Tue, 14 Jan 2014 19:00:00 +0000

This is the second part of my reconstruction of my academic lineage, in which we encounter someone whose dissertation defense lasted seven hours and someone else who basically compiled his dissertation the night before it was due.

I am still learning quite a bit about each of these academic ancestors of mine, but because this could take a while, I wanted to present at least the outlines of the tree and give a few notes on the characters in it.

In the first part, we reached Eduard Schwartz, who defended his dissertation in 1880 in Bonn and who worked with two advisors, Franz Bücheler and Hermann Usener. Before we go further, I have to note that with Schwartz, there’s a blemish in my academic ancestry: Wikipedia says that in 1928, Schwartz became a supporter of the antisemitic Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur (although they also report that he had no sympathy for the Nazis). We’ll soon see that there is a modicum of anticipatory redemption earlier in the tree.

Bücheler & Usener

Usener and Bücheler were the twin towers of classical philology in Bonn, lifelong friends, and jointly advised plenty of other students besides Schwartz. Here are pictures of them:

With them, the tree branches in an interesting way. Bücheler and Usener both got their degrees in Bonn (Bücheler in 1856 at the age of 18 (!) and Usener in 1858 at the age of 24). Both of them had two advisors, as far as I can tell, and they shared one of them.

Franz Bücheler (* 3. Juni 1837 in Rheinberg; † 3. Mai 1908 in Bonn) graduated on March 13, 1856 in Bonn with a dissertation entitled “De Ti. Claudio Caesare Grammatico” (freely downloadable from Google), which deals with Latin orthography during the time of Emperor Claudius. He lists as advisors Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker and Friedrich Ritschl. Here are the title page and the vita from his dissertation:

Hermann Carl Usener (* 23. Oktober 1834 in Weilburg; † 21. Oktober 1905 in Bonn) wrote a dissertation called “Analecta Theophrastea” (freely viewable and downloadable from the library in Munich). He dedicates the work to his two main teachers: Christian August Brandis and, again, Friedrich Ritschl. Here are the title page, dedication, and vita from the dissertation:

The Bonn-centrism of this period of our genealogy is both personally appropriate (given my years in nearby Cologne and my frequent visits to Bonn) and historically non-accidental: Bonn was a pre-eminent center of classical philology. A history of the University of Bonn points out the two successive triumvirats of classical philology that taught in Bonn: Usener, Bücheler, and Kekulé, and before them, Welcker, Ritschl, Jahn. The author claims that these six would have to be mentioned among the twelve most important scholars in classical studies during the 19th century. In fact, Wilamowitz is quoted as saying that the history of classical philology simply is the history of Bonn’s philological seminar.

Continuing from Usener and Bücheler, there are now three ancestors to look at: Brandis, Welcker, and Ritschl. Brandis and Welcker had no doctor father that I can identify, so only Ritschl’s branch of the tree continues into the past.

Brandis

Christian August Brandis (* 13. Februar 1790 in Holzminden; † 21. Juli 1867 in Bonn) graduated on January 12, 1812 (at the age of 21) at the University of Copenhagen, with a thesis “Commentationes Eleaticarum” (a collection of fragments from Xenophanes, Parmenides and Melissus). He had studied at the University of Kiel before, starting at the age of 18 (so it took him little more than 3 years to get his first degree). Brandis doesn’t seem to have had a clear advising relationship with anyone. I haven’t found out who, if anyone, might have been his sponsor in Copenhagen. Even his autobiographic sketch doesn’t include any mention of teachers or advisors in Copenhagen, just a list of people he hung out with. He does say that his defense lasted seven hours, so maybe that left such a scar that he repressed the memories. In any case, unless I manage to find out more, this branch of the tree ends with Brandis. Here is the title page of his thesis:

There is no vita or dedication in the thesis.

Welcker

Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (* 4. November 1784 in Grünberg; † 17. Dezember 1868 in Bonn) studied classical philology at the University of Giessen. He had to earn his keep by teaching at a kind of prep school and in his free time wrote his dissertation “Exercitatio philologica imaginem Ulyssis quae in Iliade exstat adumbrans”, which got him his doctorate two days before Christmas 1803 (when he was barely 19 years old). (I have not been able to access the work.) Welcker was home-schooled as a youth and seems to have continued mainly as an autodidact, so just like with Brandis, the tree ends with his node.

In something of an anticipatory redemption for the academic family, he was a notorious liberal and was arrested at least once.

Welcker was house teacher and friend in the Humboldt household when they were in Rome. He wrote a history of Greek gods and Mommsen said of him that the gods wouldn’t let him die before he had finished writing their history; he lived to the ancient age of 84. He was director of Bonn’s university library for 35 years.

I should note that another of Welcker’s students, Friedrich Christian Dietz, has massive progeny among modern linguists, since Uriel Weinrich and through Weinrich, William Labov, are among his decendents. See the relevant subtree here. So, all of the people tracing back their ancestry to Dietz are distant cousins of ours.

Ritschl

Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl (* 6. April 1806 in Großvargula (Thüringen); † 9. November 1876 in Leipzig) got his degree at the University of Halle in 1829 (at the age of 23). He taught at various universities but for the longest time in Bonn. He is the founder of the Bonn School of Classical Philology and thus was perhaps the true ancestor of Usener, Bücheler, Schwartz, von der Mühll, and Theiler, and thus of Egli, Kratzer, and myself. To see the topics that he covered in his teaching, we can inspect the list of all of the classes he taught when he was at the University of Leipzig from 1866 to 1876.

His most famous student is Friedrich Nietzsche, who he taught in Bonn and Leipzig, and who he helped to his first professorial appointment, in Basel, which Nietzsche got without having written a dissertation. Thus, through Ritschl’s mentorship of Nietzsche, my academic family has acquired a truly illustrious cousin!

Ritschl’s main teacher in Halle was Christian Karl Reisig but Reisig had died by the time he got his doctorate, so we will also need to trace back the lineage of his official sponsor, Moritz Meier. The story of Ritschl’s studenthood is well re-told by William Clark in his book “Academic charisma and the origins of the research university” on pages 230-237 (based largely on Ribbeck’s biography of Ritschl). Here’s the gist of it:

Ritschl started as a student in Göttingen in 1824, studied in Leipzig in 1825 and 1826, and then went to Halle. He had studied with Gottfried Hermann in Leipzig and then studied with Hermann’s student Reisig in Halle. Reisig was in a feud with Moritz Meier, who had been appointed director of the philological institute over Reisig’s head. That feud was in fact a continuation of a feud between Reisig’s teacher Hermann and Meier’s teacher Böckh. We will get back to this (a faint echo in the past of the sixties’ Linguistics Wars?).

Reisig founded and ran a private society which was meant to be a rival to the official institute run by Meier. Clark picks up the story:

In Ritschl’s student days at Halle, public disputation enjoyed high esteem anew, especially among the classicists. Nonclassicists trembled when they faced classicists as opponents in disputation, still conducted in Latin. Internecine warfare between the classicists had arisen from the projection of the Hermann-Böckh feud into the camps of Reisig’s society versus Meier’s Greek section of the Halle seminar. Ritschl had transferred to Halle in 1826, the year after the Hermann-Böckh feud had become bitter. He soon made a name for himself as an opponent at disputation. He sought to annihilate students from the seminar’s Greek section – students, that is, of Böckh’s student Meier – in disputations.

In 1828, Heinrich Foss, the senior student in the seminar and a devoted disciple of Meier, wrote and tried to defend his doctoral dissertation. Foss himself had previously attacked a student named Wex from Reisig’s classics society at Wex’s public disputation. Ritschl sought to play the avenger by attempting to destroy Foss at Foss’s public disputation in 1828. Foss received his doctorate, but the disputational battle between him and Ritschl supposedly not only split the gown but also the town of Halle in two camps. “Even the ladies” of the town supposedly took sides in this doctoral drama.

After Reisig’s death, Ritschl was without a doctor father. But Meier took the high road and took him under his wings. He even said that if Ritschl could get his doctorate and his habilitation before the fall of 1829, he would get him a job as a lecturer (Privatdozent). But this meant that Ritschl had to get two pieces of written work done by the fall. So, he did what every good student would do: procrastinate. In the end, a heroic effort got everything done just in time:

he spent three days, with a total of nine hours sleep, shaping the emendations into a coherent dissertation. He then paid for three typesetters to work through two nights to get the dissertation printed on time – the printer probably had other obligations for the normal day hours. “This was the thing composed, set, printed, and bound at night – a true work of the the night.” But it was done. He did the theses the night before the disputation. After two hours sleep, he appeared at the public disputation at 10:00 a.m. I do not know if any of Meier’s seminar students tried to annihilate Ritschl. But, by 3:00 p.m., 11 July, after five days labor with little sleep, a new doctor of philosophy existed.

Here is the title page of the dissertation, which is available from the Bavarian State Library:

I already mentioned that there will be more to say about the Hermann-Böckh feud. But clearly, bad blood arose easily in those days. Ritschl was the central party in the so-called “Philology War of Bonn”. The gist: Ritschl wanted to hire an additional faculty member to strengthen classical philology in Bonn when his colleague Welcker was getting on in years. He chose Otto Jahn and got him hired without Welcker’s knowledge, while Welcker was abroad on sabbatical. Welcker wasn’t all too thrilled when he found out. Jahn tried hard to become Welcker’s friend, which angered Ritschl. Years later, Jahn tried to get his friend Hermann Sauppe hired, this time behind Ritschl’s back. Sauppe in the end didn’t accept the offer, but Ritschl went ballistic and started a campaign against Jahn. Ritschl was reprimanded by the ministry of education, the press got riled up, the parliament discussed the case. Fun and games. In the end, Ritschl left Bonn to take a position in Leipzig. Soon though, Bücheler and Usener restored Bonn Philology to its leading status.

In the next installment, I will talk about Ritschl’s teachers Meier and Reisig, and their teachers Hermann and Böckh. Reisig, by the way, is often mentioned as the first philologist to take semantics seriously, under the term “Semasiology”, which he coined.

Outreach

Tue, 16 Jul 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Two quick links:

I was interviewed on the site “How to become a professor” on the topic of “How to become a professor in linguistics”.
My colleague Caspar Hare appeared on the podcast “You’re the expert”, representing normative ethics. Highly recommended (and thoroughly enjoyable).

Hunger

Sat, 06 Jul 2013 20:00:00 +0000

Here’s an interesting article [HT: Steve Crandall]:

Ciampolini, Mario, David Lovell-Smith, Timothy Kenealy, Riccardo Bianchi: 2013. Hunger can be taught: Hunger Recognition regulates eating and improves energy balance. International Journal of General Medicine. 6:465-478. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2147/IJGM.S40655.

Why do I find this interesting?

Any help with weight control is truly welcome.
I like seeing Open Access journals that are publishing good stuff.
I love that there is a video abstract of the paper.
I like the "Resume" at the end of the paper, which has five short subsections:
- What was already known
- What had been overlooked
- What could not be known
- What the authors’ studies have added
- Implications

Doing this for many scientific articles wouldn’t be a bad idea at all.

Charles Leonard Hamblin

Fri, 05 Jul 2013 20:00:00 +0000

[This is a revision of a 2003 blog post.]

A student in my 2003 advanced semantics class asked about C.L. Hamblin, who in semantics is mostly — and justly — famous for his early montagovian paper on questions: C.L. Hamblin: 1973. “Questions in Montague English”, Foundations of Language 10: 41–53. [By the way, Foundations of Language was the precursor journal of Linguistics and Philosophy.]

But who was he and what else did he do? I didn’t know, but in 2003 I found two web pages by Peter McBurney about him. It turns out that he was both a philosopher and apparently a pioneer in computer science (he died in 1985):

[Francisco Gomes Martins pointed out to me this week that my old post about Hamblin had defunct links in it. Luckily, the Wayback Machine at archive.org still has copies. So, that’s what’s linked to above.]

Two tidbits: “According to his obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald, Hamblin spoke 25 languages, mostly from the Asian-Pacific region, but also including ancient Greek. … At the time of his death, he was apparently attempting to set words of Wittgenstein to music.”

After I first posted about this, Peter McBurney, the author of the two web pages referred to above, wrote to me to remind me that

Hamblin’s book on Imperatives (published posthumously in 1987 by Blackwell, Oxford) was also influential with some linguists. This book has also influenced some recent work in computer science, on automated delegation between computational entities.

Peter McBurney followed up with another email:

Dear Kai —

In your email of 8 May, you asked me about Charles Hamblin’s teachers in London. I have now had the opportunity of reading Hamblin’s PhD thesis at University of London. Although no one is thanked or acknowledged in his thesis, I have learnt from a former PhD student of Hamblin that he did his PhD under Karl Popper.

The thesis presents a strong critique of Claude Shannon’s then-recent theory of information for failing to deal with the meaning of information, along with a semantic theory of question-response interactions. Hamblin proposes a possible-worlds semantics for these, which is interesting in light of the fact that this was written 3 years before Saul Kripke’s first publication on the matter in 1959. Hamblin’s thesis also considers everyday usage of the word “information” and how this bears on any theory of information. His thesis is a mix of computer theory, philosophy of logic, formal logic, and philosophy of language — perhaps one of the earliest works in which these disciplines were combined.

Best,

— Peter

Francisco asked me whether Hamblin’s thesis is available online. After some digging, it turns out it is:

http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=3&uin=uk.bl.ethos.504487

You have to register for free and go through some hoops but in the end you will be able to download a pdf of Hamblin’s thesis. Here’s the cover page:

Up-goer five semantics

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 19:00:00 +0000

A couple of months ago, Randall Munroe’s xkcd web comic explained the design of the Saturn V rocket using only the thousand most common words of English: “the Up Goer Five explained using only the ten hundred words people use the most often”.

Explaining hard things in simple language has now become an internet meme. Just this morning, I found Walton Jones explaining his lab’s work on the genetics and neuroscience of olfaction in Drosophila: “We are interested in how little animals with six legs smell things”. There is a tumblr blog with many of these summaries.

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor makes it easy to experiment with writing down your research in the ten hundred most used words. Here’s an attempt at an up-goer five abstract for my upcoming colloquium talk at McGill (“Hedging your ifs and vice versa”, joint work with Thony Gillies):

How does the word “if” help things we say mean what they mean? It can work together with other words like “maybe” and “probably” to make things we say less strong. But how does it do that?

Many people have tried to find out how this works, but we will show that they face a big problem when one looks at people talking to each other and pointing to things the other said.

Can we do better?

There are some obstacles for a linguist. You often need to mention linguistic expressions that you work on. I was lucky that if, maybe, and probably are licit. On the other hand, “sentence” is not allowed.

Related: George Boolos’ classic exploit “Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable”.

Statement on Aaron Swartz

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 19:00:00 +0000

We are deeply saddened by Aaron Swartz’s death, and send our condolences to all who knew him. We are very mindful of his commitment to the open access movement. It inspires our own commitment to work for a situation where academic knowledge is freely available, so that others are not menaced by the kind of prosecution that he faced. We encourage everyone to visit www.rememberaaronsw.com, a memorial site created by Aaron’s family and friends.

Scott Aaronson
Sasha Costanza-Chock
Ellen Finnie Duranceau
Kai von Fintel
Richard Holton
George Stephanopoulos
Anne Whiston Spirn

Members of the MIT Open Access Working Group

[cross-posted from the OA Working Group wiki and Scott Aaronson’s blog]

S&P acquired by LSA

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:00:00 +0000

[Crossposted from S&P Editors Blog]

We are excited to share good news about the future of S&P. We have been working with the LSA on moving S&P out of its current incubating stage to the next level with fuller support. This morning, the LSA Executive Committee unanimously approved an agreement to that effect.

As of today, S&P is a full-fledged LSA journal, alongside Language but independent of it. The LSA will join MIT and the University of Texas in providing financial support to the journal. In return, S&P is to become a journal owned by the LSA and titled “Semantics and Pragmatics” with the subtitle “A Journal of the Linguistic Society of America”.

The day-to-day operations of the journal will not change. The current editorial team will stay in place. The policies and procedures, including the open access nature of the journal, will remain as they are. Big decisions will be made cooperatively by the LSA Executive Committee, the editors, and the S&P advisory committee.

Both the LSA and the S&P team are excited about this partnership. Open access is the future of scholarly communication and we intend to work together to make S&P the best journal in its field and a model for our discipline and others.

An S&P underground classic

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 19:00:00 +0000

[Crossposted from the S&P Editors Blog:]

Semantics & Pragmatics today published an underground classic, Craige Roberts' famous paper "Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics", which had previously been published in a volume of OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, and then circulated in a slighly edited manuscript form, but was never officially published. With the help of Anders Schoubye, Chris Brown, and Justin Cope, the old manuscript was transformed into LaTeX and formatted for the S&P stylesheet. Craige wrote a new afterword and prepared an annotated bibliography, which is linked from the afterword. We're proud to be able to make this classic paper and the supplementary material available in an official publication.

Reissuing underground classics is a worthwhile undertaking, we believe. Some famous examples are David Kaplan's "Demonstratives" published in Themes from Kaplan, Kripke on presupposition published in Linguistic Inquiry, and in a sense also Grice's William James Lectures. There was also volume 7 of the series "Syntax and Semantics" entitled "Notes from the linguistic underground" (edited by Jim McCawley in 1976), featuring famous papers such as Karttunen's "Discourse referents" and gems like "Why you can't do so into the sink" by Lakoff & Ross. So, we are continuing a respectable tradition.

Question for our audience: which other underground classics in semantics and pragmatics should S&P consider publishing? You can email us, comment on our Facebook page or our Google+ page, tweet (cc'ing @semprag), or leave a comment on our Editors Blog.

Suspicion re Cestagi

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 20:00:00 +0000

I received this email:

Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:06:16 +0000
Subject: Curriculum Vitae for Scientists and Researchers
From: Olivia Frogous olivia.frogous@gmail.com

Dear Kai Von Fintel,

I would like you to consider Cestagi when updating your curriculum vitae for this upcoming academic year. Cestagi is a web application that allows you to create and manage your CV with ease using academic best practices. Your personalized CV page can be monitored using Google-like visitor analytics and easily exported offline into Word, Latex, or PDF using various templates including NSF and NIH standards.

I encourage you to take some time and learn more about this free service by visiting:

http://www.cestagi.com/

Please recommend Cestagi to your colleagues and friends who you feel would benefit from it.

Best regards,

Olivia
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology

I know of no “Olivia Frogous” at MIT and a search verified that there is no such person here. A Google search revealed at least one page where another institution was warning about this person (who had identified themselves as being affiliated with that institution in an email). So, appropriately suspicious, I looked at the advertised web service for sharing CVs.

At first glance, it looks legitimate and includes a privacy policy and terms & conditions of use. But there’s no information whatsoever on the site about who is behind the service and where it is run from. The whois information on the domain is deliberately uninformative as well, it just states who their registrar and webhost is.

There is a Quora query about this service with a positive reply from someone calling themselves “Mark Frendrope”, whose only presence on the web appears to be to tout Cestagi in a few places.

At this point, I can only assume that this may well be a fraudulent enterprise, perhaps designed to harvest personal information from those who upload their CVs to it. I would stay away from it at all costs and look for other ways of sharing academic information about yourself (Academia.edu comes to mind, or just posting your CV on your own webpages).

To repeat, following up on the fraudulent claim in the email signature that “Olivia Frogous” is affiliated with MIT somehow, I have found no evidence that Cestagi is a legitimate service with identifiable people standing behind it.

Update (2012-11-20): After I posted this note, I was immediately contacted by anonymous staff at Cestagi and asked to take the note down. I said I would update it if they gave me relevant information and and if they explained the spam campaign. It took quite a while but the website is now updated and identifies the owner (and sole staff?) of the site as Adrian M. Kopacz, a recent Mechanical Engineering PhD from Northwestern University.

I’m still awaiting an explanation for the spam campaign and the fraudulent affiliation claims by the spammers. By the way, a friend reported getting similar emails: from “Ann Mrego”, purportedly affiliated with Northwestern University, and “Stan Latuga”, “from” UC Berkeley; both institutions my friend has had e-mail accounts with. Google searches did not turn up any results for these people at these institutions. So, it does seem like there was a systematic campaign and I hope it’s not continuing.

Update (2013-01-29): I still have a bad feeling about this operation. Adrian Kopacz emailed me as follows: “I wish for you to remove this content, including my personal information, as it reflects negatively on the branding of Cestagi.” I do not intend to take this down nor to revise its cautionary tone unless and until the spammy character of the enterprise is cleaned up. I fail to see why this individual would not want his personal information to be associated with his own project, unless, of course, the project is not one that he can be proud of.

In the mean time, another MIT affiliate reports receiving an email touting Cestagi, this one from “John Merlocke”, another name that does not turn up anything via Google search, except a shell Google+ profile. So, the spamming campaign from made-up people does seem to be continuing. [I do wonder which fake name generator is being used to make up these names.]

One more update (2013-01-29): Word now that the spam/phishing campaign definitely continues unabated. Researchers at the United States Geological Survey have been receiving identical emails touting Cestagi from someone called “Stacy Ferando” (again a name that yields no Google hits other than a shell Google+ profile).

The template that the campaign currently uses is this:

Dear $X,

I noticed you have an outdated curriculum vitae web page. You should keep it up-to-date while working at $Y.

You may want to take advantage of Cestagi to create and maintain a curriculum vitae following academic regulations and best practices:

http://www.cestagi.com/

Please let others know about this free platform. I believe it will be of great benefit to everyone.

Warm regards,

$FAKE-NAME

Needless to say, my correspondents do not have outdated CVs.

Guidelines for writing abstracts

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 20:00:00 +0000

Found via Facebook this morning: Guidelines for writing abstracts, drawn up a while ago by Johan Rooryck and Vincent van Heuven after consultation of the Linguist List. I pretty much agree 100% with these guidelines, but about 200% with this one: “Don’t put your examples on a separate page, even when the abstract guidelines allow you to do so: abstract reviewers hate having to go back and forth between pages”. (This is a corollary of the same principle that banishes endnotes from academic publishing.)

Google Scholar personalized updates

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 20:00:00 +0000

If you have made a personal profile on Google Scholar, there is now a new feature when you go to the Google Scholar site: personalized updates, “My updates”, a list of new articles that Google’s algorithm determines are related to your own work. When I checked my updates this morning, it looked quite accurate, lots of stuff that I find relevant, quite a bit of which I already knew about but some that I didn’t. What would be good is a weekly email summarizing what’s new, but in the absence of this it’s another page to check out once in a while.

Conditional request

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 20:00:00 +0000

Today’s Zits comic is one for conditionals afficionados:

News from the open access revolution

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:00:00 +0000

Three items of interest on the open access front:

Harvard council advises faculty to publish through open access venues. Coverage of this memo: Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, The Atlantic, The Guardian
MIT open access working group devising MIT’s response to Elsevier’s hostility towards open access preprint mandates
The Elsevier boycott has now over 10,000 signatures.

I think it is becoming clearer all the time that academic publishing will turn inexorably and perhaps quite quickly towards full open access. The question is which publishers and which universities, scholarly societies, and funding agencies will be at the forefront and who will lag behind.

[I will only occasionally posts news items of this nature. If you want to follow the revolution more closely, I recommend Peter Suber’s Google+ updates and Stuart Shieber’s blog.]

My academic genealogy

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 20:00:00 +0000

I received my PhD from UMass in 1994 with a dissertation called “Restrictions on Quantifier Domains”. I started teaching at MIT in 1993 and was finishing my dissertation during my first year of teaching here. My dissertation advisor (Doktormutter, “doctor mother”) was Angelika Kratzer. There were other very strong influences, of course, chief among them Barbara Partee, but for the purposes of the tree I will go by formal dissertation advisor relationships where possible. I will find some other occasion to talk more about my own intellectual biography and research career.

Angelika Kratzer

There are many ways in which Angelika was the perfect doctor mother for me. But one aspect I want to highlight here is that just like me, she has a passion for the history of our field. Her dissertation abounds in historical connections, one of which that struck me early on was the emphasis on the contributions of John Wallis [If you’re interested in this kind of thing, John Wallis appears as a character in a fun novel: “An Instance of the Fingerpost”]. This kind of historiographic interest was something I just soaked up. One of my early encounters with semantics, in fact, was a seminar taught by Professor Schepers of the Leibniz Research Institute in Münster on medieval semantics (William of Sherwood, William of Ockham, etc.) and other classes like that. For example, I learned to read Aristotle in the original and wrote one of my first college-level term papers on the notions of contradiction and contrariety in Peri Hermeneias (using not just the original but also medieval Arabic commentaries thereon).

Angelika wrote her dissertation entitled “Semantik der Rede: Kontexttheorie – Modalwörter – Konditionalsätze” doi:2027/mdp.39015015396008 in 1978. Her official advisor at the University of Konstanz in Germany was Urs Egli. I will not expand on Angelika’s intellectual biography, something she has already sketched on her website. Here’s an excerpt:

“I wasn’t born to become a professor. The town I grew up in didn’t have a high-school for girls. Girls went to a Middle School run by nuns, learned cooking and bookkeeping, and got married. The next town over did have a high school for girls, but it only had a Modern Language track. The boys’ high school there had Modern Languages, too, but there also was a Science and a Classics branch. For reasons that nobody could remember any longer, the Classics track took in a few girls every year. I was one of them, and nine years of Latin and six years of Greek - six days a week - must have turned me into a linguist. I discovered modern linguistics when I tried to find a way to combine my love for the shape of languages and mathematics, and discovered the close-to-Utopian Linguistics Department in Konstanz after getting lost at the traditional University of Munich and taking a year off as an assistant teacher at the Lycée Jean Dautet in La Rochelle (France). I cobbled a graduate education together for myself via research assistantships and scholarships that took me to the University of Heidelberg and to Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). Before coming to Amherst, I was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen and taught at the Technical University in Berlin.”

[She further talks about] “a dream of a community of scholars that I myself was part of as a young student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Konstanz, where Arnim von Stechow and Peter (Eberhard) Pause took me in as a colleague and friend, and where I first met Irene Heim, (Thomas) Ede Zimmermann, and my thesis advisor Urs Egli. Other academic teachers whose lectures and seminars left a mark on me include Peter Glotz (film and communication), Wolfgang Braunfels (history of art), Hans Rheinfelder (Dante), and Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, who was a guest professor at Konstanz for a semester.”

[About her dissertation she adds:] “From the time I started my dissertation work in New Zealand with the help of Max Cresswell, George Hughes, John Bigelow, and David Lewis, I have been interested in context dependent semantic phenomena, in particular tense, modals and conditionals. My dissertation Semantik der Rede (Semantics of Discourse) dates from 1978, but the questions I struggled with then are still very much alive these days, and I keep returning to them.”

Angelika has shared with me this picture taken after her dissertation defense:

Urs Egli

Urs Egli wrote a 1967 dissertation entitled “Zur stoischen Dialektik” at the University of Bern (Switzerland) under the direction of Willy Theiler. This information was a bit hard to find. I obtained an interlibrary loan copy of Egli’s dissertation and there is a page with a statement from Dekan (Dean) Prof. Dr. E. Walder that the dissertation had been accepted by the philosophical-historical faculty of the University of Bern at the request of Herr Prof. Dr. W. Theiler. I show here the title page, the decanal note, and the vita from the end of the thesis (a traditional component of doctoral dissertations).

An aside: A striking (mostly unsurprising) thing to see in Egli’s acknowledgments is that in his long list of professors whose lectures and seminars he attended, there is not a single woman. In fact, Angelika is not just the only woman in my entire tree, but there is no other woman to even be mentioned in the intellectual biographies of any of these men [this may not be strictly true, since it seems that Anna Comnena might be in the tree]. Our community has come a long way when I can honestly say that the four most important people in my immediate academic background are Angelika, Barbara, Irene, and Sabine.

When I first posted this first installment of my genealogy, I was contacted by Urs Egli and his wife, Renata Egli-Gerber. They shared with me a number of relevant materials, including a hard copy of Egli’s dissertation, some other writings, and an academic autobiography, which I can now make publicly available: “Wie man in Europa sowohl Altphilologe als auch Semantiker werden konnte”. For those who do not read German, here’s some highlights:

Egli entitles these memoirs: “How in Europe one could become both a classical philologist and a semanticist”. He was fascinated by Latin and Greek in school where he delved deep into grammatical and historical studies of those two ancient languages. He was also influenced early by the writings of Carnap, but it wasn’t possible to study mathematical logic or model-theoretic semantics in Bern, so after graduating from high school in 1960, he enrolled in General and Historical Linguistics and Greek and Latin, against the hopes of his high school teachers who thought he should study physics or “at least” biology. But his chosen disciplines offered at least a fail-save career option: he obtained a high school teacher’s diploma for Greek and Latin.

Around 1962, he discovered Chomsky’s “Syntactic Structures” in the university library and started thinking about ways to connect generative grammar, logic, and philology. He was a student of Georges Redard (a student of Emile Benveniste, in turn a student of Meillet’s, in turn a student of Saussure’s). Redard, though, wasn’t willing to advise a disertation on logic and formal grammar. So, what Egli finally settled on was a topic in the history of logical semantics (an area that he was drawn to through Bochenski’s work) and Willy Theiler in the same department as Redard agreed to advise the thesis. He wrote on stoic logic and semantics, combining logical analyses drawing on Mates and Lukasiewicz and philological work of Theiler, von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, Eduard Schwartz, Fuhrmann, Kochalsky, and von der Mühll. The thesis was accepted in 1967.

Redard, who knew Chomsky from a summer school, wrote to Chomsky and helped Egli get an offer of a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT, but he couldn’t go there because of health reasons. (Egli adds that not going to MIT may have been a good thing because he suspects that at the height of the “linguistics wars”, he might not have thrived there, because of his tendency to try to give all approaches their due and to combine them where possible.) So, he went to Cologne to work with Hansjakob Seiler, the director of the linguistics department there (who was just about to retire when I myself started studying linguistics there in 1984 and who was replaced by Sasse, who I took several seminars from). While there, he discovered the third significant work that informed his career: Montague’s universal grammar (through Helmut Schnelle’s exposition). He wrote his “habilitation” (second dissertation to earn the right to be a professor) on Montagovian/Chomskyan themes. This time, Redard advised the work and Egli stresses that the combination of insights that he put together seems to him to realize one of Redard’s favorite aphorisms of Saussure’s: “la linguistique sera algébrique ou elle ne sera pas”. Indeed. In 1974, the philosophical-historical school of the University of Bern accepted the habilitation.

Egli says that apart from his official genealogy through Theiler, von der Mühll, Schwartz, which is what I will be tracing here, he has a second lineage through Redard (associating him with Max Niedermann, Jacob Wackernagel, Emile Benveniste, Antoine Meillet, and Ferdinand de Saussure). And then, obviously, there is the intellectual influence, which we all share, of Carnap, Chomsky, and Montague.

Willy Theiler

Willy Theiler (* 24. Oktober 1899 in Adliswil; died 26. Februar 1977 in Bern) taught at the universities of Königsberg (1932–1944) and Bern (1944–1968). Here’s a photo of him from an obituary article in the journal Gnomon:

Theiler’s dissertation “Zur Geschichte der teleologischen Naturbetrachtung bis auf Aristoteles” was filed at the University of Basel (also Switzerland) in 1924 (at the age of 25) under the direction of Peter von der Mühll. A later edition is in fact dedicated to von der Mühll.

According to Theiler’s obituary, von der Mühll was an extraordinary teacher whose seminars attracted many young scholars over the years. Even though there were 43 years between Theiler’s dissertation and Egli’s dissertation, Egli writes in his acknowledgments that von der Mühll had helped him with some information about manuscript transmission. Theiler supervised 26 dissertations (and more at institutions other than the ones he was teaching at) over his career. He was an eminent philologist, specializing in ancient philosophy.

Peter von der Mühll

With Peter von der Mühll (* 1. August 1885 in Basel; died 13. Oktober 1970 also in Basel), the tree leaves Switzerland; he was Swiss and taught at Zürich and Basel, but he got his doctorate in Göttingen (Germany) in 1909 (at the age of 26) with a dissertation entitled “De Aristotelis Ethicorum Eudemiorum auctoritate” under the direction of Eduard Schwartz, who together with Jacob Wackernagel and Friedrich Leo made Göttingen a center of excellence in classic studies. From now on in the tree, all dissertations were written in Latin. This one is a mere 47 pages long and it has a DOI: 2027/uc1.b2619343. Unfortunately, Google’s scan of the last page of the dissertation, which has a Vita including acknowledgments, is a bad scan cutting off the right side of the text, so it’s not really useful, except that one can see that he acknowledges Wackernagel among others. So, I obtained a fresh scan from Harvard’s Widener Library. I am posting a four page excerpt with the title, dedication, and Vita pages.

Von der Mühll didn’t publish all that much in his career, focusing on his teaching, advising, and on administrative duties (he was rector of the University of Basel for a while). Here’s a photo (again from an obituary article in Gnomon):

Eduard Schwartz

Eduard Schwartz (* 22. August 1858 in Kiel; died 13. Februar 1940 in München) was mainly trained at the University of Bonn (when I lived in Cologne and regularly visited Bonn, the Intercity trains used to announce that Bonn was the birth place of the composer Ludwig van Beethoven and the capital of the Federal Republic of Germany … in that order).

He received his doctorate there with a dissertation entitled “De Dionysio Scytobrachione” (freely downloadable as a pdf from Google Books) in 1880 (at the age of 22; note that the ages at which these academic ancestors got their degrees are decreasing as we go back in time, indicating how professionalized the discipline has become over time). His co-advisors were Franz Bücheler and Hermann Usener. His dissertation has a list of 11 controversial theses at the end (a feature you can still see in linguistics dissertations from the Netherlands, and which recurs in the dissertations further up the tree). The title page lists three fellow students who served as the disputants at the defense (again, a traditional component of doctoral dissertations for a while). His doctorfathers are acknowledged on the next page in the dedication, and his vita contains a list of other teachers.

[To be continued]

When you know you’re a geek

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 19:00:00 +0000

When you know you’re a geek, part 145: a slideshow needs to be prepared for a talk in a couple of days. So, you think that instead of writing the slides directly in LaTeX Beamer code (of course, anything like PowerPoint or Keynote is beyond the pale), you should write them in markdown, since that’s so nicely uncluttered. This of course means that you need a conversion engine to convert markdown source to beamer source. Enter pandoc. This of course means that you need Haskell installed, which is of course best done by running Homebrew, which doesn’t seem to be on the laptop yet. So, first step is updating XCode since Homebrew relies on that and of course, everything needs to be up-to-date so that the slide-writing can happen in a spic-and-span system. This is when you remember the first time you saw Hans Kamp give a talk: with overhead transparencies that he had handwritten on the flight over.

Citation impact 2008-2010

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 19:00:00 +0000

[Reposted from S&P Editors Blog]

We were curious to see how S&P is doing as far as the impact of published articles on the field is concerned. Below we have compiled a list of all articles published in the four main semantics journals (Linguistics & Philosophy, Natural Language Semantics, Journal of Semantics, Semantics & Pragmatics) since 2008 (the year of S&P’s first published article) that have received 10 citations or more according to Google Scholar. There are not yet any articles published in 2011 on that list. So, let’s focus on the cohort of articles published between 2008 and 2010. The four journals combined published 141 main research articles in that time frame. 54 of those (= 38%) have received 10 or more citations. S&P published fewer articles than the other three journals (11 in fact: 1 in 2008, 3 in 2009, 7 in 2010), since we’re still ramping up the quantity of publications. But S&P already has an outsized share of the top impact articles: we have 5 articles in the Top 20, and an overall rate of 64% of our articles have already received 10 or more citations.

By all accounts then, S&P’s first three years were a resounding success quality-wise. Now, we’ll be working on increasing our quantitive share of the semantics market while not decreasing our quality share. You can help: submit your best work to S&P. You will receive top-notch and fast peer-reviewing and editorial feedback and fast time-to-print. Plus, your work will be openly accessible to anyone with access to an internet connection, rather than being locked behind prohibitive subscription barriers.

[There are other things to notice, such as the domination in the upper range of articles by NLS, distancing the two older journals JoS and, especially, L&P.]

[54 citations] Kehler, Kertz, Rohde et al. - JoS 2008. Coherence and coreference revisited
[53 citations] Hackl - NLS 2009. On the grammar and processing of proportional quantifiers: most versus more than half
[48 citations] Chemla - NLS 2009. Presuppositions of quantified sentences: experimental data
[42 citations] Schlenker - S&P 2009. Local contexts
[37 citations] Rothstein - JoS 2010. Counting and the mass/count distinction
[32 citations] Wilhelm - NLS 2008. Bare nouns and number in Dëne Sųłiné
[31 citations] Barker, Shan - S&P 2008. Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding
[28 citations] Geurts, Pouscoulous - S&P 2009. Embedded implicatures
[28 citations] Breheny - JoS 2008. A new look at the semantics and pragmatics of numerically quantified noun phrases
[27 citations] von Fintel, Gillies - NLS 2010. Must... stay... strong!
[27 citations] Rullmann, Matthewson et al. - NLS 2008. Modals as distributive indefinites
[27 citations] Magri - NLS 2009. A theory of individual-level predicates based on blind mandatory scalar implicatures
[24 citations] Elbourne - L&P 2008. Demonstratives as individual concepts
[22 citations] Chemla - S&P 2009. Universal implicatures and free choice effects: Experimental data
[21 citations] Matushansky - L&P 2008. On the linguistic complexity of proper names
[21 citations] Farkas, Bruce - JoS 2010. On reacting to assertions and polar questions
[21 citations] Alonso-Ovalle, Menendez-Benito - NLS 2010. Modal indefinites
[21 citations] Bale - L&P 2008. A universal scale of comparison
[20 citations] Nouwen - S&P 2010. Two kinds of modified numerals
[20 citations] Singh - L&P 2008. On the interpretation of disjunction: Asymmetric, incremental, and eager for inconsistency
[19 citations] Kissine - NLS 2008. Why will is not a modal
[18 citations] Gualmini, Hulsey, Hacquard et al. - NLS 2008. The Question–Answer Requirement for scope assignment
[18 citations] Harris et al. - L&P 2009. Perspective-shifting with appositives and expressives
[17 citations] Abusch - JoS 2010. Presupposition triggering from alternatives
[17 citations] Ippolito - JoS 2008. On the meaning of only
[17 citations] Hacquard - L&P 2009. On the interaction of aspect and modal auxiliaries
[17 citations] Morzycki - NLS 2009. Degree modification of gradable nouns: size adjectives and adnominal degree morphemes
[17 citations] Lascarides et al. - JoS 2009. Agreement, disputes and commitments in dialogue
[16 citations] Bale et al. - JoS 2009. The interpretation of functional heads: Using comparatives to explore the mass/count distinction
[16 citations] Gillies - S&P 2010. Iffiness
[16 citations] Brasoveanu - L&P 2008. Donkey pluralities: plural information states versus non-atomic individuals
[16 citations] Moltmann - L&P 2009. Degree structure as trope structure: a trope-based analysis of positive and comparative adjectives
[15 citations] Villalta - L&P 2008. Mood and gradability: an investigation of the subjunctive mood in Spanish
[15 citations] Syrett, Kennedy et al. - JoS 2010. Meaning and context in children's understanding of gradable adjectives
[15 citations] Lascarides et al. - JoS 2009. A formal semantic analysis of gesture
[14 citations] Arregui - L&P 2009. On similarity in counterfactuals
[14 citations] Chemla - JoS 2008. An epistemic step for anti-presuppositions
[13 citations] Abbott - L&P 2008. Presuppositions and common ground
[13 citations] Hacquard - NLS 2010. On the event relativity of modal auxiliaries
[13 citations] Chaves - L&P 2008. Linearization-based word-part ellipsis
[13 citations] Moltmann - NLS 2008. Intensional verbs and their intentional objects
[12 citations] Koenig, Mauner, Bienvenue et al. - JoS 2008. What with? The anatomy of a (proto)-role
[12 citations] Nicolas - L&P 2008. Mass nouns and plural logic
[12 citations] Dekker - L&P 2008. A multi-dimensional treatment of quantification in extraordinary English
[11 citations] Nouwen - NLS 2008. Upper-bounded no more: the exhaustive interpretation of non-strict comparison
[11 citations] Sharvit - L&P 2008. The puzzle of free indirect discourse
[11 citations] Gualmini et al. - JoS 2009. Solving learnability problems in the acquisition of semantics
[11 citations] Brasoveanu - JoS 2010. Decomposing modal quantification
[11 citations] Davis - JoS 2009. Decisions, dynamics and the Japanese particle yo
[11 citations] Lin - NLS 2009. Chinese comparatives and their implicational parameters
[10 citations] Martí - NLS 2008. The semantics of plural indefinite noun phrases in Spanish and Portuguese
[10 citations] Beck - S&P 2010. Quantifiers in than-clauses
[10 citations] Zweig - L&P 2009. Number-neutral bare plurals and the multiplicity implicature
[10 citations] Francez - L&P 2009. Existentials, predication, and modification

[NB: data from February 5, 2012]

Total papers published by the four journals 2008–2010: 141
54 have received 10 citations or more (54/141 = 38%)

Share of the Top 54:

JoS: 15 papers (of 41 published 2008–2010) = 15/41 = 37%
L&P: 17 papers (of 55 published 2008–2010) = 17/55 = 31%
NLS: 15 papers (of 34 published 2008–2010) = 15/34 = 44%
S&P: 7 papers (of 11 published 2008–2010) = 7/11 = 64%

More on Elsevier Boycott

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:00:00 +0000

The Elsevier boycott I mentioned last week has gathered momentum. Here is some coverage:

Attack from big money publishers

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Speaking of open access, I hope that most of you have heard about the US Research Works Act, which is a bill before Congress that would roll back the open access policies of some federal grant agencies. I urge you all to do what you can to raise awareness of this. Here is some essential reading:

An opinion piece in the Guardian: “Academic publishers have become the enemies of science: The US Research Works Act would allow publishers to line their pockets by locking publicly funded research behind paywalls”.
An editorial by Michael Eisen in the NYT: “Research Bought, Then Paid For”.
Related posts on Eisen’s blog:
- “Elsevier-funded NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Wants to Deny Americans Access to Taxpayer Funded Research”,
- “Plagiarist or Puppet? US Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s reprehensible defense of Elsevier’s Research Works Act”.
Some notes on the act from Peter Suber, especially on growing dissent from academic publishers that are members of the Association of American Publishers, which has endorsed the bill.
Peter Suber’s postings on Google+ are a convenient way to follow the issue.

My position on this is exactly the one very forcefully put by Harvard Provost Alan M. Garber:

“We endorse the view that every federal agency funding non-classified research should require free online access to the full-text, peer-reviewed results of that research as soon as possible after its publication. There are three powerful reasons to take such a step. First, taxpayers deserve access to the results of taxpayer-funded research. It is their right. Second, public access maximizes the visibility and usefulness of this research, which in turn maximizes the return on the public’s enormous investment in that research. Third, public access accelerates research and all the benefits that depend on research, from public health to economic development, manufacturing, and jobs …”

[From: http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/stp-rfi-response-january-2012]

Update (2012-01-18): Good news. Two of the big guns, Nature and Science have come out in opposition to the Research Works Act and in support of the NIH Open Access Policy. It’s very clear that Elsevier and their cronies are isolated in the scientific community, but unfortunately they have the ears of many ill-informed congresspeople.

My open access policy

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 19:00:00 +0000

MIT, of course, has an Open Access Policy, which I am proud to have played a small role in establishing. Having that policy has guided my personal decisions about venues for publishing and reviewing, but I have noticed that I have not always been very principled and consistent in my decisions. So, it is time for my own personal policy. Here it is.

Kai’s Open Access Policy

Journals: I will only publish in, review for, and serve on editorial boards for journals that allow authors to deposit at least the final manuscript version (“postprint”) in an open access repository (such as MIT’s Dspace or the Semantics Archive), without any embargo (such as having to wait for 24 months before making the OA version available).
Book chapters: I will personally only contribute book chapters, if the publisher allows me to deposit at least the final manuscript version in an open access repository, without any embargo. (I will consider reviewing books or book chapters that are not OA-friendly, because books are a different business from research journals, although I wish that there was more movement towards OA books.)
Books: I will only publish books myself that have a significant open access component, such as making at least the final manuscript freely available, or even the final published version while charging for print versions of course.

For current reference, here are the policies of leading publishers of relevance to our field(s), culled from the MIT Libraries list of publisher policies:

Elsevier: With 2011 revision of author agreement, requires authors to opt out.
MIT Press: In full cooperation. Allows posting of final published version.
Springer: MIT and Springer have established an agreement that extends flexible reuse rights to MIT authors of papers published in Springer journals. Among other rights, the final submitted manuscripts of MIT-authored Springer papers can be posted openly in MIT’s open access repository DSpace@MIT. Authors should sign the standard Springer agreement and do not need to submit an author’s addendum.
Wiley-Blackwell: Has indicated it will be requiring authors to opt out.

Obviously, this list doesn’t include some important publishers, such as Oxford University Press. So, before making any particular decisions, I will consult with whoever is asking me to publish or review for them.

S&P Year-End Stats

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 19:00:00 +0000

[cross-posted from S&P: Editors’ Blog]

Time for a year-end statistical rundown on how S&P is faring.

In 2011, we published 5 main articles and 3 short articles for a total of 331 pages.

The submission rate has almost doubled since 2010. We are very lucky to now have 6 associated editors working hard alongside David and Kai. We received 43 new submissions in 2011, of which we published 5 (three of the articles published in 2011 were originally submitted in 2010) and accepted 6 more (those are in various stages of revision or typesetting). We declined 24 submissions (6 of those were declined without external review, usually within a day or so). For the 29 submissions that were sent out for review and have already been decided on, the average time to the decision was 48 days (our goal is 60 days, which we missed in only a few cases). 8 submissions are still under review.

Our acceptance rate for this year’s submissions was 11/35 = 31% (to be updated when the rest of the submissions have been decided on).

Our articles are each downloaded well over 1000 times per year. Our most downloaded article is Matthewson 2010, which has been downloaded more than 12,000 times so far. By now, some of our articles are building up a good citation rate on Google Scholar. As of 2011, S&P is also indexed in the influential MLA International Bibliography. We will continue to work on having S&P be indexed and ranked by all relevant providers.

All years

2007: 4 submissions, all declined, avg decision: 37 days, acceptance rate: 0%

2008: 16 submissions, 5 published, avg decision: 59 days, acceptance rate: 31%

2009: 21 submissions, 6 published, avg decision: 59 days, acceptance rate: 29%

2010: 25 submissions, 3 published, 1 accepted, avg decision: 58 days, acceptance rate: 16%

2011: 43 submissions, 5 published, 6 accepted, 8 under review, avg decision: 48 days, acceptance rate: 31%

[NB: these stats do not include commentaries or other articles that were not subject to standard external peer review but were solicited by the editors and received expedited editorial review. S&P has published 6 invited commentaries and is about to publish its first “underground classic”. Also NB: one submission from 2010 is still in revision cycle; 2011 stats not final until all decisions made]

Downloads (not including invited commentaries)

as of 12/28/2011:

Matthewson 2010: 12,233 downloads of the pdf of the article
Schlenker 2009: 5,342
Geurts & Pouscoulous 2009: 5,119
Chemla 2009: 4,723
Beck 2010: 4,688
Barker & Shan 2008: 4,318
Nouwen 2010: 3,960
De Swart & Farkas 2010: 3,923
Gillies 2010: 2,513
McCready 2010: 2,604
Barker 2010: 1,827
Franke 2011: 1,779
Rothschild 2011: 1,253
Rothschild & Klinedinst 2011: 698
Abrusán 2011: 681
Khoo 2011: 539
Magri 2011: 287
McClure 2011: 87
Bary & Haug 2011: 63

Google Scholar citation counts

as of 12/29/2011 (links go to Scholar citations):

Schlenker 2009: 42
Barker & Shan 2008: 30
Geurts & Pouscoulous 2009: 28
Chemla 2009: 22
Nouwen 2010: 16
Gillies 2010: 15
Beck 2010: 10
Farkas & DeSwart 2010: 7

Danny & Kai

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:00:00 +0000

Sabine took this while I was chairing the semantics session at Ling50@MIT, where Danny and Philippe were the speakers:

Morris & Noam Recursion

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:00:00 +0000

I’ve already shared this picture via the requisite social networks, but here it is for the blog:

A picture taken after Noam Chomsky’s keynote talk at Ling50@MIT, the scientific reunion to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the MIT Linguistics phd program. Morris and Noam are holding a 1988 picture of them holding a 1953 picture of them … Or, as Bob Frank put it: “The linguists the colleagues the department invited applauded posed for a picture.”

The politburo

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 19:00:00 +0000

A subset of the MIT syntax/semantics politburo, some of us even smiling:

(Taken during Rick Nouwen’s colloquium when Irene Heim was introducing the speaker, which is why she’s not in the row with us.) (Thanks to Danny Fox for the pointer at the picture and thanks to mitcho for taking the picture!) (Can you put three parentheticals in brackets in a row?) (Sure, you can.)

Google Scholar Citations

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 20:00:00 +0000

As announced on the Google Scholar Blog yesterday, there is now the option of creating a researcher profile of yourself. Google’s documentation of this service (“Google Scholar Citations”) is here.

Google Scholar Citations is currently in limited launch with a small number of users. This is a new direction for us and we plan to use the experience and feedback from the limited launch to improve the service. Click here and follow the instructions to get started. Keep in mind that this is a limited launch and we may not be able to accept new users when you click. If this happens, we’ll direct you to a sign-up page where you can register to be notified when Google Scholar Citations is available to all users.

I have worked a bit on my profile, correcting some typos (like the spelling of my name … sigh). NB: “If you have substantially changed the bibliographic record (title, authors, journal, etc.), we may not able to match it up with Google Scholar’s index right away. If so, it may take a few days for your citation metrics to include the updated article.” That’s a bit scary so I haven’t gone all out updating the bibliographic details, but I might try it on a test case.

My first post on Language Log

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 20:00:00 +0000

As hinted yesterday, I have joined the Language Log juggernaut (thanks to Mark Liberman and Geoff Pullum for recruiting me). Here’s my first post: Justice Breyer, Professor Austin, and the Meaning of ‘Any’.

Modal Semantics in the News

Mon, 16 May 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Wired reports on the brouhaha surrounding the security of Dropbox, a geek favorite (I am including myself). Dropbox used to say that

Dropbox employees aren’t able to access user files, and when troubleshooting an account, they only have access to file metadata (filenames, file sizes, etc. not the file contents).

Now they say

Dropbox employees are prohibited from viewing the content of files you store in your Dropbox account, and are only permitted to view file metadata (e.g., file names and locations).

Any normal natural language user would interpret these two statements as distinct, I would think. (not) able to is a modal typically understood as talking about what is practically possible, while prohibited is all about things that are practically possible but circumscribed by rules and regulations.

Dropbox takes the heroic stance that the statements are equivalent:

In our help article we stated “Dropbox employees aren’t able to access user files.” That means that we prevent such access via access controls on our backend as well as strict policy prohibitions.

As Kratzerians, we’re used to modals being heavily context-dependent, but I think Dropbox has almost no leg to stand on. Does anyone care to defend Dropbox’s semantic analysis of able to?

Theoretical Workload Limit

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

This pretty much sums it up. I seem to have reached my theoretical workload limit:

(No) skin in the game

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:00:00 +0000

Whenever people (in particular, graduate students) talk to me or correspond with me about topics I have written about at some point in my career, I notice they are confused by my general attitude. Well, part of it is that I have a memory like a sieve as far as details of my own papers are concerned, so I often have to puzzle out things with them as if I was reading someone else’s work. But the thing of it is that I do consider old work of mine to be work by someone else. That work was written by a previous time slice of myself that I do not anymore have any privileged access to or even a strong emotional bond with. So, I do not feel a strong emotional attachment to the ideas and approaches advocated in those papers. I look at them as honest attempts to figure out how things work, but if more recent investigations of the same facts or additional facts point to a different solution, that’s just fine with me. I don’t feel like I necessarily “have skin in the game”, as the sports metaphor goes. So, if students challenge my old ideas, so be it. Let’s follow the facts wherever they lead.

There are some countervailing considerations.

First, at least for a certain amount of time, I believe that authors have an obligation to be the best advocate for their ideas that they can be. This relates to a point made by Geoff Pullum in his “Five Golden Rules (well, actually six) for giving academic presentations”, with which I wholeheartedly agree:

REMEMBER THAT YOU’RE AN ADVOCATE, NOT THE DEFENDANT. It’s your idea that’s being presented, not you. The reason for not feeling nervous is that you are not what’s up for consideration (not even at a job talk; they consider you later!). This isn’t about you (that’s why you shouldn’t begin with an apology: that’s about how you feel). It’s the ideas that are going to get scrutiny. If those ideas don’t survive after today, too bad for them. You can’t work miracles. But for today, you’re there to do as fair a job as you can for them during their twenty minutes in the spotlight. You’re a vehicle, an advocate, a public defender. These ideas might have been unfairly dismissed without a trial. No matter what the ultimate verdict, you will have served the court of scholarly opinion if you defend them effectively.

And secondly, no matter how old the work is, there are two offenses against it that I do get hot under the collar about: not properly acknowledging and citing the work and misrepresenting the work. But that’s actually an attitude I have about anybody’s work. Citing properly and representing previous work accurately is an indispensable part of serious scholarship and science.

How do others feel about their old work? Do you feel like you still have skin in the game?

Snow!

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 19:00:00 +0000

In case it wasn’t clear, Northern America is blanketed by one mega-storm right now:

Winter

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 19:00:00 +0000

Many worlds

Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:00:00 +0000

Ever since reading Max Tegmark’s article in Scientific American on the many worlds version of quantum mechanics, which mentioned David Lewis’ plurality of worlds, I have been wanting to learn more.

In high school, I was very good at chemistry but avoided physics at all costs, for no apparent reason, so I have a large deficit in that area. A good plan might be to read the textbook Physics for Future Presidents by Richard Muller at UC Berkeley. But that will have to wait for some vacation in the future.

Instead, when I saw Colin Bruce’s new book on “the many worlds of quantum”, I decided to make it my bedtime reading for this week [NB: that was written in May 2003 and I have made little to no progress since then!].

There is in fact a brief mention in the book of David Lewis, occasioned by his paper “How many Lives Has Schrödinger’s Cat?”. So, I actually decided to first read Lewis’ paper and the commentary by David Papineau later in the same issue of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

The basic issue seems to be that if there truly are many worlds branching off from each other all the time (something also called the “no-collapse” theory), this has great impact on our thinking about decisions, ethics, and our philosophy of life in general. Have you ever thought “I could kill myself” when you realize you made a carelessly wrong decision a while back? Well, even if you make the right decision “here in this world”, there will be another world (in fact many such worlds) where you made the other — wrong — decision and suffer the consequences. So, what difference does it really make if you make the right decision “here”? As long as the plurality of worlds is a harmless abstraction introduced to make it easier to think about the semantics of modal expressions in natural language, for example, such considerations may not be very disturbing. But if all those worlds are really real, we have a lot of thinking to do. Of course, some philosophers and some physicists have been thinking about this for a while, but it’s all new stuff to me.

Lewis points out a truly disturbing thought: in many worlds, we eventually die of course and maybe that’s fine since we don’t have any further experiences in those worlds (we may of course worry about the people and the world we leave behind in those worlds). But there is always a (however small) chance that we do not die but barely continue to live, albeit maimed and disabled. Since those are the only worlds where we continue to have experiences, we all can expect to live horrible lives at some point. Lewis writes:

“What you should predominantly expect, if the no-collapse hypothesis is true, is cumulative deterioration that stops just short of death. … How many lives has Schrödinger’s cat? If there are no collapses, life everlasting. But soon, life is not at all worth living. That, and not the risk of sudden death, is the real reason to pity Schrödinger’s cat.”

David Papineau’s commentary in the AJP tries to soothe these worries, but clearly there is much to figure out. Colin Bruce reports that “although [Lewis’] words are light, I am told by those who worked with him that he was terrified by this hypothesis [Fn: Sebastian Sequoia-Jones, pc to Bruce, March 2004]. By a cruel coincidence, he died suddenly and unexpectedly from diabetes within weeks of giving that lecture — at least in our version of reality. His paper is about to be published posthumously as I write. He must have died a badly frightened man, and the psychological impact on his colleagues was considerable.”

I am now halfway through Bruce’s book and somewhat overmatched by the strangeness of the quantum world, but I’ll continue working through it and cannot see how one can’t be fascinated by this area of inquiry. I wish I had paid more attention in high school. The fact that I did in some other worlds doesn’t help me much “here”.

Some other pointers: the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on “Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”, the Everett FAQ, Max Tegmark’s “Welcome to my crazy universe”, and a recent Fresh Air interview with physicist Brian Greene, who just wrote a book called The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos.

Italics in conversation

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 20:00:00 +0000

Elsevier stumbles upon benefit of electronic publication

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 20:00:00 +0000

[Crossposted from S&P Editors Blog:]

“Elsevier Introduces Article-Based Publishing to Increase Publication Speed”:

Elsevier, the world-leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and solutions, announced today the launch of Article-Based Publishing – a new publishing model that publishes articles as final and citable without needing to wait until a journal issue is complete. With an increasing focus on online publishing, there is a growing need for innovative publication models geared towards individual articles instead of the print-based issue model. Article-Based Publishing is the assigning of final citation data on an article-by-article basis, decoupled from the compilation of the journal issue itself.

Article-Based Publishing is major step forward in publishing. Now the article is published in its final form within just a few weeks after acceptance, which provides the journal an important competitive advantage, said Professor Ren Janssen, Editor of Organic Electronics. Authors will be equally pleased to see the results of their research published sooner.

For centuries, academic articles have been published in journals, issue by issue. While this practice has ensured organized citation information, it has also created boundaries for the timing of each published article. Now, Article-Based Publishing makes it possible to publish articles in their final form, with volume, issue and page numbers, before the entire issue is finalised. This new way of publishing speeds up the publication of articles by an average of 7 weeks.

Let us just say “welcome to the club”.

So not my life

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 20:00:00 +0000

This is so very much not my life:

What’s a snooze button? Can I have one?

Life on Planet New England

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:00:00 +0000

Happy Truck Day!

On citing well

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:00:00 +0000

[Crossposted from S&P Editors Blog]

The journal Nature Chemical Biology has an editorial that is well worth reading and pondering for other fields as well:

2010. On citing well. Nature Chemical Biology 6:2. p.79. doi:10.1038/nchembio.310.

Unfortunately, the editorial is behind a paywall. Here are the main points in excerpts.

The appearance of new ideas and discoveries in the scientific literature is a reflection of ongoing scientific progress. Individual articles are nodes of scientific knowledge, but citations of published work link together the concepts, technologies and advances that define scientific disciplines. Though information technology and databases have helped us to better manage the expanding scientific literature, the quality of our citation maps still hinges on the quality of the bibliographic information contained in each published paper. Because article citations are increasingly used as metrics of researcher productivity, the citation record also affects individual scientists and their institutions. As a result, all participants in the scientific publication process need to ensure that the citation network of the scientific literature is as complete and accurate as possible.

Many factors may stand in the way of good citation practices. […] Each research group has its own referencing habits, and some may feature their own work too prominently or rely on familiar references without a critical examination of whether a particular citation is the most appropriate in the given context. Some researchers may not cite ‘old’ papers either because these are incorrectly viewed as being out of date or because inertia inevitably may encourage authors to cite the articles that show up more frequently in searches or that have appeared recently.

Researchers understandably are motivated, in both professional and personal ways, to have their scientific contributions recognized through citation by their peers. The community also values the accurate assignment of credit and precedence for scientific discoveries. As a result, even an accidental omission of a necessary citation may create an uncomfortable situation for a papers authors. More problematic, however, are cases where authors deliberately omit relevant citations. Because perceived novelty can be an important factor in determining where a manuscript is published, some authors may be tempted to avoid citing earlier or concurrent work from their own laboratories to enhance the apparent advance of a submitted study. In other cases, some authors may consider ongoing scientific disagreements, personal conflicts or competition a sufficient justification for omitting citations of work by others. Clearly authors need to do everything they can to avoid accidental omission of key references, and should never exclude relevant citations for nonscientific reasons. In turn, all scientists, independent of their roles as authors, referees or editors, need to renew their commitment to guaranteeing that literature citations correctly assign credit for ideas and discoveries and are placed thoughtfully in manuscripts and published papers.

Though editors and referees can help, authors are ultimately responsible for the information contained in their published papers. We recommend that authors take several important steps to increase the quality of their citation lists. First, principal investigators need to teach young scientists the appropriate ways to select manuscript references and mentor them in the ethical dimensions of citation. Second, authors need to put as much care into selecting and accurately citing references as they devote to the rest of their manuscripts. As part of this process, authors should perform comprehensive literature searches as they write and revise manuscripts, so as to identify relevant work that may need to be cited. Before including references in their citation lists, all authors should have read and discussed the candidate references to ensure that they are the most relevant choices and are called out at the appropriate point in the paper.

The responsibility for maintaining and enhancing the citation network of a discipline resides with all participants: authors, referees, editors and database managers. Thoughtful attention during the writing and review processes remains the first and best approach for ensuring citation quality and the appropriate assignment of credit in published papers. Yet new publishing and database tools that lead us to an interactive multidimensional scientific literature will become essential. As publishers move toward integrating functionality such as real-time commenting on published papers and creating living manuscripts that preserve the snapshot of a research area through the lens of a published paper, while permitting forward and backward linking, the scientific literature is poised to become a richer environment that will support future scientific progress.

At S&P, we are fully committed to these goals, but could surely work harder to improve the citation practices. One of our criteria for evaluating submissions is “contextualization of research”, as spelled out in our inaugural editorial:

Are the main research questions contextualized in terms of earlier related work? Does the paper adequately cite related work? Could the impact of the paper be improved through modifications that would show the relevance of the results to future work in the same or other fields?

Advice to authors: by contextualizing results appropriately, the author not only increases the worth of the paper to the audience, but also makes the job of the editors and reviewers easier. It will be much easier for us to be sure that a paper should be published if we can clearly see what previous work it betters. Authors would do well to flag, both in the abstract and early on in the paper, the relationship of the paper to earlier proposals, and to indicate in broad terms what the relative advantages of the new approach are. Of course, it is then incumbent on the author to make sure that all such claims are fully justified in the main text of the article.

Another aspect of this is that once the relevant citations have been chosen, the bibliographic detail given in the article needs to be as complete and clear as possible:

full first names of authors and editors
both volume and issue numbers for journal articles
page numbers for everything that appeared on numbered pages
DOIs for every work that has a DOI (important both for easy access by readers to the cited literature and for all kinds of automated processes, present and future)
URLs for unpublished manuscripts and other obscure sources
conference proceedings formatted as specified in the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics

S&P strives towards citing well, which requires continuous attention from authors, reviewers, and editors.

Banner Year for S&P

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:00:00 +0000

[Reposted from S&P Editors Blog]

Today marks the start of what we hope will be a banner year for our journal. We just published two articles:

a main article by Sigrid Beck on “Quantifiers in than-clauses”
a commentary by Uli Sauerland on “Embedded Implicatures and Experimental Constraints: A Reply to Geurts & Pouscoulous and Chemla”.

We have three more main articles in production, which should all appear quite soon:

Donka Farkas & Henritte deSwart: “The semantics and pragmatics of plurals”
Thony Gillies: “Iffiness”
Rick Nouwen: “Two kinds of modified numerals”

We also have two or three more commentaries in various stages of submission/production, and are always soliciting commentaries on any of our main articles.

Finally, there are four papers under current review, we’re expecting revised versions of a number of manuscripts, and we’re awaiting several manuscripts that have been promised to us.

All in all, the journal is ramping up phenomenally and this will be the year that the quantity of our output will reach the levels of the other three main journals in our field.

Please help us make the journal more widely known and please submit your work to us. You’ll get excellent reviewing and editorial service and your work will look great thanks to our superior typography and it will be published free of charge and openly accessible to everyone.

David Lodge Thinks …

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 13:48:49 +0000

A tip for a cognitive science novel:

A couple of weeks ago at the ESPP congress in Lund, I presented a paper on Harlem conditionals, in which Sabine and I champion a 1970 paper by Aaron Sloman on the semantics of ought:

Sloman, Aaron. (1970). “Ought and Better”. Mind, 79(315): 385–394.

In some ways, Sloman anticipated some rudiments of the context-sensitivity story about modals that Angelika Kratzer later developed. Definitely worth a look.

At the conference, David Over told me about the novel Thinks … by David Lodge:

At the fictitious University of Gloucester, science and literature collide in the persons of 40-something Ralph Messenger and Helen Reed. Ralph's research as the director of cognitive science and his wit and charisma as an explicator of artificial intelligence make him a bit of a star in Britain, and with the ladies. He delights in opportunities for extramarital activities within the confines of the don't-ask-don't-tell arrangement he's established with his wife. [from amazon.com's reprint of a Publisher's Weekly review]

Apparently, Ralph Messenger is modeled after none other than Aaron Sloman, who in real life however is not a womanizer, according to David Over. Lodge writes in his Acknowledgments:

My biggest single debt is to Aaron Sloman, Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. Aaron patiently answered my elementary questions, gave me copies of his publications, introduced me to his colleagues, welcomed me to his department seminars, escorted me to an eye-opening international conference on consciousness (held appropriately enough at Elsinore) and generally acted as an indispensable guide to consciousness studies in general and artificial intelligence in particular. Though he shares some of the view of my fictional character, Ralph Messenger, on these matters, anyone who knows him will testify that they have nothing else in common.

Present Indicative Counterfactuals

Sun, 18 Apr 2004 20:00:00 +0000

Commenting on my “If you’re Lance Armstrong …” post, Thony Gillies points out that this Hubie Brown-type conditional is a special case of the sportscasterese present indicative counterfactual conditional. As in (topical example from today’s Red Sox game, after Manny Ramirez made a spectacular catch running into the Green Monster in the 9th inning, protecting a slim Sox lead):

“If Ramirez doesn’t catch that, it’s a double and the tying run is in scoring position.”

Apropos my little working paper from 1997 on The Presupposition of Subjunctive Conditionals, I had a brief email exchange with Larry Horn about this kind of conditional. Here are some passages from my main message to Larry and his responses:

At 4:06 PM -0400 5/22/98, Kai von Fintel wrote:
Dear Larry —

thanks for your message. As an absolutely incorrigible sports addict, I have been struck by this construction many times. [It first struck me at the same time when I realized that the NFL was using instant replay to ascertain the truth of such counterfactuals as “If Sanders hadn’t pushed Rice, he would have come down inbounds”.]

Actually, upon further review I do not agree with your assessment:

[Larry had tried to convince me that “The existence of this construction clearly forces the severance of grammatical mood from the semantico-pragmatics of counterfactuality. There’s no presupposition, conventional implicature, whatever, in these cases of indicative “if p (then) q” that p is epistemically possible.”]

First possible response (not one I would be attracted to): this construction is ungrammatical, these guys are confused. Hence nothing follows about grammar.

Serious question: this seems much more localized to sportscasters than for example the reporter’s simple present, which also surfaces in stage directions and other circumstances (which has led people to actually propose funky semantic analyses of this use of the simple present). How widespread is this counterfactual indicative?

[Larry responded: “That is an interesting question. I’ll raise it on ADS-L, where we had an earlier discussion of the PICFC (as I’ll abbreviate the construction), since this would be an interesting sort of isogloss. All other cases of sportscasterese (not just the “shazam historical present” that Erich Woisetschlaeger and John Goldsmith discussed a decade or two back, but also e.g. the extension of certain currency descriptions for other uses: “he’s hitting a buck fifty”; “there’s a buck ten left in the quarter”; “a cornerback weighing a buck seventy-five taking down a tank like Ironhead!”) or sportsplayerese (“my bad”) are attested elsewhere, but I haven’t come across PICFCs outside of SportsWorld.”]

Second possible response (somewhat more believable, but still not great): these are run-of-the-mill indicative conditionals with a presumption of epistemic possibility. They would receive an analysis along the lines of the historical present tense, whatever that may be. Something like: “present” with respect to a temporarily assumed/imagined speech time (which is actually in the past of the real speech time), “epistemically possible” with respect to a temporarily assumed/imagined epistemic state (which is actually one that the speaker knows s/he’s not in (anymore)). This is the kind of move that I report in my subjunctive paper as the move favored by Portner for why some “subjunctives” do not seem straightforwardly “counterfactual”, according to him they are counterfactual but only with respect to a temporarily assumed point of view.

Third possible response (perhaps the one I would spend most energy on if I were to expand my paper to include discussion of this construction): I say in my paper that indicatives do not actually carry any direct presupposition/implicature. Subjunctives do. And it is the choice of an indicative over a subjunctive that may usually be interpreted as indicating epistemic possibility. In other words, subjunctives are marked and only good for uses where (at least some) worlds outside the set of epistemically possible worlds are quantified over. Indicatives are unmarked and thus in principle usable in many more circumstances; but of course usual considerations will limit their use.

There’s possibly quite a lot more to say about this construction. For example, one might wonder whether it could be used in the Anderson-type argument:

“If he had taken arsenic, he would show exactly these symptoms.”

This is impossible in a normal indicative:

“??If he took arsenic, he shows exactly these symptoms.”

But now imagine a sportscaster who hasn’t paid much attention to what is happening peripherally to the game. Rodman totally flips out and throws the ball at some spectators. Now, one thing that would explain his behavior is that he was heckled. Can our sportscaster say:

“If Rodman is heckled by the guy, he does exactly this. So, perhaps he was heckled.”

[Larry replied: “Funny you should bring these up. On the example-laden scrap paper I was typing my message from, I had an observation to the effect that Anderson-type non-CF contexts are impossible with PICFCs, but then I started to doubt the conclusion, although my Andersonesque examples weren’t as convincing as yours. Another context would be the SportsCenter replay: Dan Patrick says Rodman should be suspended for his antics, but Kenny Mayne points out that they don’t have complete footage of what preceded the incident—after all, [your PICFC here].”]

Anyway, thanks again for your message. If I expand the paper for publication in a journal, I will try to take this construction into account.

which I never did.

I double-checked the archives of the ADS-L list, but no new insights into this constructions seem to have turned up, except the tip that David Carkeet, author of various novels with a linguist hero, mentioned the construction in a New York Times “On Language” column on July 22, 2000.

If you’re Lance Armstrong, …

Sat, 17 Apr 2004 20:00:00 +0000

A line from an article in the Lexington Herald-Leader: “If you’re Lance Armstrong, why, exactly, do you feel the need to go for Tour de France title No. 6?”

I cite this line here not because I am a fan – which I am – but because it’s a weird conditional set-up, which is actually quite common in sports reporting, I believe. I know that Hubie Brown – once a successful coach, then a basketball color guy, now back coaching the Memphis Grizzlies – is very fond of the construction: “Now, if you’re Phil Jackson, you want to preserve your final time-out …”.

I guess it’s a device to involve the audience in the thought processes of the subject of the discourse. It would be interesting to relate this to the ongoing research on counterpart relations in attitude contexts, going back to George Lakoff’s famous Brigitte Bardot sentence: “I dreamed I was Brigite Bardot and that I kissed me”. See for example two papers by Orin Percus and Uli Sauerland.

No head injury is too trivial to ignore

Wed, 21 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000

At Language Log, Chris Potts has a post on negatives that seem superfluous, in that with or without them the sentence seems to mean the same. Mark Liberman adds to this a naturally occurring example he found:

I challenge anyone to refute that the company is not the most efficient producer in North America.

Mark asks “Is this a case where the force of the sentence is logically the same with or without the extra not? Or did Mr. Duffy just get confused?”

I would certainly lean towards the latter explanation. But it’s quite well-known that it is hard not to be confused. The coolest case I know is this:

No head injury is too trivial to ignore.

[Think about it.]

I believe it was brought into the literature by Wason and Reich:

Wason, P. C., and Reich, S. S., “A Verbal Illusion,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 31 (1979): 591-97.

It was supposedly found on the wall of a London hospital. Actually, a Google search suggests that the ultimate source of the quote is Hippocrates (460377 BC). By the way, a number of the Google hits seem to come from sites run by injury lawyers. Also by the way, the full quote appears to be “No head injury is too severe to despair of, nor too trivial to ignore”, which is even more mind-boggling, at least for my poor little brain.

I recall that Higginbotham discusses the example somewhere. I’ll try to find the reference when I have time.

Appointments with Kai

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

You can self-schedule appointments with me that are either half an hour long or a full hour. Meetings are often more productive if I get an advanced look at relevant material (such as a draft handout). Please only schedule a full hour if you will in fact send me pre-meeting material at least a week in advance.

Here are the links to schedule appointments:

30 minutes: https://fantastical.app/fintelkai/30min-meeting
60 minutes: https://fantastical.app/fintelkai/60min-meeting

semantics etc.

work

plans

The goal

Upcoming

Ongoing Activities

von

Sort order in bibliographies

Tricking BibTeX

Generating a better bibstyle

Hacking existing bibliography styles

References

about

contact

Some notes about getting in touch with me

In a word

Seven columns

CSSL22 X-marking

Venue

Instructor

Course description

Prerequisites

Refresher on intensional semantics

Early readings on X-marking

Further readings

Readings on X = past

Reading on X = modal widening

Class materials

Surveillance publishing

Two ditties on *want*

Demodalizing our terminology

biblatex-unified on CTAN

S&P transition

CSSL19 The only class

Venue

Instructor

Course description

Pre-class survey

Prerequisites

Early readings

Class 1: Basics of exclusives (slides)

Class 2: Basics of exceptives (slides)

Class 3: Clausal exceptives (slides)

Class 4: Scalar only, Mirativity (slides)

Class 5: only, NPI licensing, and the syntax of focus (slides)

Class 6: only, bare plurals, bare conditionals (slides)

Class 7: (Minimal) sufficiency (slides)

Class 8: The only connectives (slides)

Nurses say yes and no

CSSL18 The linguistics of desire

Venue

Instructors

Course description

Pre-class survey

Prerequisites

Q&A

Eight topics

1. Possible worlds semantics (Slides)

2. Semantics of desire (Slides)

3. Syntax of desire (Slides)

3a. Temporal issues

4. Complement/Mood selection (Slides)

5. Conditional desires (Slides)

6. Anankastic conditionals (Slides)

7. X-marking (Slides)

8. X-marked desires (Slides)

Keenan & I on witnesses

More Zombie Lingua shenanigans

Current content of Johan Rooryck's Interaction with Elsevier page (as of 8/17/2017)

The 2017 Elsevier campaign

October--November 2015

Asleep at the wheel at Zombie Lingua?

Prerequisites

Presupposition Accommodation

“Stupidity”

Coping with boredom

Checking on the zombies

S&P Early Access

Echoes of Eco

MIT Support for Glossa

Two ditties on want