Join Dan Lassiter at 3:30 in the Greenberg Room for the Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop. His presentation is entitled “Modal semantics: Quantificational vs. scalar approaches,” and the abstract is below.
From its beginnings, work on the logic and formal semantics of modality has been dominated by two trends: the assumption that modals denote restricted quantifiers over possible worlds, and a near-exclusive focus on the semantics of the modal auxiliaries must, might, may, can, should, ought and a non-representative sample of modal verbs and adjectives (in particular require(d), permitted/permissible, possible, necessary,and obligatory, neglecting modified and comparative forms of these as well as e.g. likely, good, certain, evident, plausible, prefer among many others). Read the rest of this entry »
At noon today, the Phonetics and Phonology workshop will meet in the Greenberg room. Join Ed King and the rest of the local P&P community to continue last week’s discussion of the Goldsmith and Riggle paper.
Also at the upcoming Metrics, Music, and Mind conference reported on in last week’s edition will be Kristin Hanson (UC Berkeley), who will talk about: “Formalizing Nothing: Conditions on Empty Positions in Music and Verse.”
Elizabeth Traugott gave a talk on “Constructionalization Contrasted with Constructional Change” at the workshop on Constructional Change in the Languages of Europe, NIAS, The Netherlands, January 11th-15th.
This week it’s time again for a Sociochat! Come to the Axe and Palm at 10 am on Wednesday!
This week’s Psychology Colloquium will feature Susan Goldin-Meadow (Psychology, U of Chicago): “How our hands help us think.” You can find the talk in Jordan Hall (Building 420), Room 041, and you can find the website for the talk here.
Here is a fun article, submitted by Rosa Ray, that explores some of the differences between British and American English.
