Linguistics/Philosophy 596D
Handouts

Spring 2004



January 14: Preliminaries
    MPP: Overview of the strong compositionality hypothesis
    HH: Sources of ambiguity in natural language utterances

January 21: Compositionality of natural language vs LOT
    MPP: Thoughts on Fodor, Hume Variations
    HH: Meaning in frames? Gleitman, Pinker, Goldberg

January 28
    MPP: More on Hume Variations: Does LF exist?
    HH: Finishing off Fischer/Gleitman et al. vs. Pinker (see handout above)
            Coming soon: a more explicit discussion of the 'homophonous constructions'
             problem.

February 4
 
   MPP: Higginbotham on compositionality
    HH:  Why Fodor's 3 reasons not to analyse 'kill' as 'cause to die' are not reasons not to analyse 'melt' as 'make melted.


February 11
 
   MPP: More on Higginbotham on compositionality
    HH:

February 18
 
   MPP:
    HH:
McGinnis on aspectual properties of idioms, Williams on lexical knowledge

February 25
 
   MPP:
    HH:
Kratzer on severing the external argument, Marantz on no escape from syntax

March 3
 
   MPP:
    HH: Marantz on remarks on nominalization, Hale and Keyser

March 10
    MPP:
    HH: Horvath & Siloni on little v, Kiparsky on denominal verbs

March 17 **Spring Break**

March 24
 
   MPP:
    HH:

March 31
 
   MPP: Pietroski on 'Meaning Before Truth'
    HH:

April 7

Dusana

 
   MPP:
    HH:

April 21
 
   MPP:  Iatridou & VonFintel on "If and When If-clauses can restrict quantifiers"
    HH:
Mike, Erin

April 28

    Justin Fisher on connectionism and linguistic competence

 
   MPP:
    HH:

May 5
Greta, reprise of Mike on Schiffler & Fodor, summation

 
   MPP:
    HH: