Loose ends
are records of research initiatives that have not come to fruition – handouts that did not grow into papers, project proposals that were not approved for funding, etc. To boot:
- » Subjective Language: Its means and ends (SUBLIME)
- » "By": A vindication of the Anscombe thesis
- » You don't know what you have until you lose it: what lose can tell us about have
- » A string of handouts, sorted by recency, graded on a scale from tutorial (✩) to original (✩✩✩✩)
- ✩✩✩✩ Fresh takes on VP ellipsis (2017)
- ✩✩✩✩ Evidence that speech acts can embed and ways to model it (2017)
- Note that definition (6) gives the wrong result for an embedded indexical. It is a simplification of Krifka's actual analysis of this case, where the argument of "assert" (or "tell") has type e(e(ss)), not just (ss), but where, still, "binding of the subject pronoun he to the speaker of the speech act x is assumed without specification of an explicit mechanism, for simplicity". It does not in fact seem straightforward to encode the Kaplanian substitution scheme (as rendered, e.g., on p. 282 in my "Reports of specific indefinites", JoS 30(3), 267–314) in this format. Thanks to Serge Minor for pointing this out.
- ✩✩✩✩ How verbs are conceived and born: three theories (2017)
- ✩✩✩✩ Subjective content at sole issue (2017)
- ✩✩✩✩ Arguments about ambiguity I, Arguments about ambiguity II (2016)
- ✩✩✩✩ Adjectives and determiners of distribution (2016)
- Note that footnote 4 on page 7 should rather read "Icelandic: í einstaka glugga"
- » Comitative coordination of adjectives
A 2019 ERC Advanced Grant proposal – specifically, Part B2: The scientific proposal (pdf). Unsuccessful, and in fact, only the 6-page short version was ever reviewed.
A 2018 short paper manuscript submitted to Philosophical Studies but rejected because the overlap with my 2016 paper in Synthese was excessive. Fair enough, but the angle is different here.
A presentation at a workshop at UPF in Barcelona on the occasion of the doctoral defense of Toni Bassaganyas-Bars, in February 2018
A presentation at the SynSem workshop at Sevletunet, Numedal, in April 2015, on the long-standing problem of the Austrian flag being red and white without being red or being white.
- » "Alone": A graduate course experiment
- » Two presentations to the project Nominal Modification at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt (May 2013)
- ⇾ "New"
- The modifier new gives rise to intriguing interpretations, some of them reminiscent of the intrasentential context dependence found in implicit domain restriction with different kinds of quantifiers or the superlative. I give an analysis where the adjective stem maps an implicitly modified (or even itself implicit) noun onto a measure relation combining with a positive, a comparative or a superlative formative in standard ways.
- So-called relative clauses (or relative constructions) of the third kind, commonly referred to as amount or degree relatives, remain puzzling, descriptively and theoretically. Broadening the empirical scope of the phenomenon, I consider two alternative strategies for dealing with it, one based on type lifting and the other on decomposition and ellipsis. The former is more elegant, but the latter may be more realistic.
In autumn 2013, I taught an experimental graduate course in semantics at the University of Chicago: A realistic research rehearsal. The course description:
I would like to try out an idea for a "collaborative case study effort" in semantic analysis. We will take some phenomenon which is not well understood (by anyone), explore it and delineate it, identify the problem(s), make descriptive generalizations, scan the literature, form hypotheses and test them, check out on crosslinguistic stability, cast about for appropriate theoretical tools and existing analyses of reminiscent phenomena, discern alternative approaches, consider how to divide labor between syntax, context, and pragmatics, weigh arguments according to theoretical standards, – with a view to come up with a jointly approved account, maybe even a joint paper. Maybe the best choice of phenomenon would be a word which turns out to have surprising properties, not shared by other members of its class. The concrete topic will be decided on at the start of the seminar.
The most tangible result (so far) is the handout for our presentation at the UChicago Linguistics Colloquium on December 5, 2013: Alone.
- » Autofocus, custom focus
My presentation at the Tübingen symposium Focus, alternatives and comparison in honor of Arnim von Stechow, March 2007, elaborating on Eckardt's theory of selbst and extending it to cases where the associate seems to be in focus itself.