Barbara H. Partee
Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy
Department of Linguistics,University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
Abstracts:
Formal semantics and pragmatics: Origins, issues, impact.
“Semantics” can mean quite different things in different contexts; fields concerned with semantics are as diverse as psychology, law, computer science, lexicography, logic, philosophy, and linguistics. “Pragmatics” is an equally wide-ranging term, with applications in politics and ethics as well as in linguistics and philosophy. Formal semantics and pragmatics as it has developed over the last 40+ years has been shaped by fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, philosophers, and logicians.
In this talk I’ll reflect on developments in semantics in linguistics and philosophy starting in the 1960’s and the growth of formal semantics and formal pragmatics. I’ll touch in passing on innovations and “big ideas” that have shaped the development of formal semantics and its relation to syntax and to pragmatics over the decades. And I’ll describe some of the ways that advances and debates in formal semantics and pragmatics have been and are connected with foundational issues in linguistic theory, philosophy, and cognitive science.
Compositionality and Coercion: The Dynamics of Adjective Meanings
The focus of the talk is the dynamic interaction of meaning and context. The challenge faced by rule-based approaches such as formal semantics is how to account for context-dependent meaning shifts without abandoning compositionality. I argue that in fact compositionality can be seen as one of the driving forces in context-sensitive meaning shifts. My case study is the semantics of different kinds of adjectives. One factor observed by Hans Kamp years ago is the interplay of context-dependence and intensionality: why skillful is intensional but large is not, even though we may consider a large house not to be a large building. I will offer a solution to some puzzles of “privative” adjectives like fake, counterfeit and “redundant” adjectives like real, arguing that adjective meanings are more constrained than was appreciated in earlier work.Facts about “NP-splitting” in Polish castserious doubt on the standard hierarchy of adjectives, and the data become much moreorderly if privative adjectives are reanalyzed as subsective adjectives. This revised account requires the possibility of coerced expansion of the denotation of the noun towhich an adjective is applied. One of the broader implications of this perspective is that there should in principle be no conflict between the goals of “formal” and “cognitive” approaches to semantics, although there are of course differences in priorities and in favored forms of argumentation.