24.979
Topics in Semantics
Seminar on current research in semantics and generative grammar. Topics may vary from year to year.
Fall 2018 · Topics in Semantics: Negative Polarity Items
This course is concerned with Negative Polarity Items. While raising familiar foundational questions for linguistic theory, Negative Polarity Items enter into complex and often revealing interactions with a host of other phenomena in grammar. Investigating several such interactions, the course touches on topics such as focus, presupposition, exhaustification, quantification, (in)definiteness, modals and attitudes, comparison and superlatives, and questions.
Readings
- Homer, Vincent. “Presuppositions can be disruptors too: a case against Strawson-entailment” in Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. Natasha Abner and Jason Bishop (2008), pp. 220–228. ISBN: 9781574734287.
- Ladusaw, William A. “Polarity sensitivity as inherent scope relations.” Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Texas, Austin, TX (1979). ISBN: 978-0824045555.
- Gajewski, Jon and I-Ta Chris Hsieh. “Comments on negative polarity items in definite descriptions” in The Art and Craft of Semantics: A Festschrift for Irene Heim , vol. 1, ed. Luka Crnic and Uli Sauerland. MITWPL 70 (2014), pp. 181–198. ISBN: 9781502857477.
- Schein, Barry. “Event semantics” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language , ed. Gillian Russell and Delia Graff Fara. Routledge (2012), pp. 280–294. ISBN: 9781138776180.
- Bassi, Itai and Moshe E. Bar-Lev. “A unified existential semantics for bare conditionals” in Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21, ed. Robert Truswell, Chris Cummins, Caroline Heycock, Brian Rabern, and Hannah Rohde (2018), pp. 125–142. ISBN: 9781726706841.
- Chierchia, Gennaro, Danny Fox, and Benjamin Spector. “Scalar implicature as a grammatical phenomenon” in Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning , vol. 3, ed. Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, and Paul Portner. De Gruyter (2012), pp. 2297–2331. ISBN: 9783110253375.
- Chierchia, Gennaro. “Universal free choice” in Logic in Grammar: Polarity, Free Choice, and Intervention . Oxford University Press (2013), ISBN: 9780199697977.
- ———. “An analogy between a connected exceptive phrase and polarity items” in Beyond ‘Any’ and ‘Ever’: New Explorations in Negative Polarity Sensitivity , ed. E. Csipak, R. Eckards, M. Liu, and M. Sailer, pp. 183–212. De Gruyter (2013). ISBN: 9783110303728.
- Geurts, Bart. “Existential import” in Existence: Semantics and Syntax (Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy) , ed. I. Comorovski and K. von Heusinger. Springer (2008). ISBN: 9781402061981.
- Menéndez-Benito, Paula. “On dispositional sentences” in Genericity , ed. Alda Mari, Claire Beyssade, and Fabio Del Prete. Oxford University Press (2012), pp. 276–292. ISBN: 9780199691807.
- Chierchia, Gennaro. “ Even negative polarity items and only negative polarity items” in Logic in Grammar: Polarity, Free Choice, and Intervention . Oxford University Press (2013), pp. 143–190. ISBN: 9780199697977.
- Chierchia, Gennaro. “Intervention” in Logic in Grammar: Polarity, Free Choice, and Intervention . Oxford University Press (2013), pp. 373–427. ISBN: 9780199697977.
Prerequisites & course information
Prereq: Permission of instructor G (Fall, Spring) 3-0-9 units Can be repeated for credit.
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026–2027
- MIT OpenCourseWare ↗Fall 2018
- MIT OCW syllabus ↗
- MIT OCW readings ↗
- Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.