Time Machines

Semantics Summer Reading List

This summer, I organized two book clubs involving people from people in the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Many of us have difficulty finding time to read, and the hope was that by forming book clubs there would be peer pressure to read some foundational material. The project has been more or less successful for different people, but at the very least I have managed a lot of reading.

The book clubs were organized around language meaning (some combination of the fields of semantics and pragmatics). Based on mutual interest, we have read or are reading the following books:

Levinson (2000) Presumptive Meanings
Quine (1960) Word and Object
Vygotsky (1934) Language & Thought
Fodor (1975) The Language of Thought
Heim & Kratzer (1998) Semantics in Generative Grammar
Tomasello (2003) Constructing a Language

Keep in mind of course that some obvious books are not on this list because we've already read them (for instance, we read Pinker's Learnability & Cognition and Jackendoff's Semantic Structures last winter) and some are not on the list because we plan to read them in the near future (Pustejovsky's The Generative Lexicon is a popular choice for this coming Fall).

That said, for those of you in the field, if you were to read 6 books on semantics & pragmatics over the summer, what would you read?

All Italians Smoke

Although most behavior experiments are conducted in the lab, it's nice to be reminded occasionally that it's possible to conduct experiments in the human's natural environment...such as a nightclub. Italian scientists studied responses to requests for a cigarette at three nightclubs in central Italy.

That scientists would study Italian's smoking behaviors comes as no surprise to anyone who has been reading semantics recently. It seems that half the example sentences in the papers I read involve some variation on "all Italians smoke."

Calling all 12 year olds

I've been analyzing data from the Memory Test. The response to that experiment has been fantastic, so I'm able to look at performance based on age, from about 14 years old to about 84 years old. Interestingly, by 14 years old, people are performing at adult levels. I have a few kids in the 10-13 range, but not quite enough. It would be nice to know at what age people hit adult competency.

So...if you or someone you know is in that age range, I'd like a few more participants in the near future. I should actually be able to put up a description of the results relatively quickly in this case, should I get enough participants.

The Value of Experiments

I have been reading Heim & Kratzer's Semantics in Generative Grammar, which is an excellent introduction to formal semantics. On the whole, I've really liked the book, until I got to an example sentence in the 8th chapter:

(1) Every man placed a screen in front of him.

The authors claimed that this sentence was synonymous with

(2) Every man placed a screen in front of himself.

I though this was absurd, because to me the first sentence must mean that there is some man (let's call him 'Jim,') and all the other men put a screen in front of Jim. It just can't have the meaning of (2). I have a great deal of respect for the authors, but my immediate reaction was that this must be one of those cases in which linguists unconciously adapt their judgments to their theory (it was important for the theory Heim & Kratzer were developing that (1) mean the same as (2)).

Just to be sure, I walked into the office down the hall and took a poll of the seven people in it, none of whom study pronouns or are particularly familiar with the literature. Two of them agreed with me, but five agreed with Heim & Kratzer. So this may be a dialectical difference.

Now I feel bad about having doubted H&K, but in any case it is a good lesson about studying language: don't trust your own intuitions. Get a second opinion.

A Counter-Productive Pet Peeve of Mine

Ant Navigation SNL-style

If you appreciated Saturday Night Live's Mother Lover, then this ode to ant navigation should be right up your alley, produced by student in Dave Barner's Developmental Psychology course at UCSD.

OK, the videos have nothing to do with each other, but both are worth watching.

Lean Times come to the World's Richest University

Academia is traditionally a good place to wait out recessions. Not so much this year. Harvard has posted a list of cost-cutting measures. Notice in particular that the number of PhD students being admitted has been reduced (no word about masters or professional school students...but then masters and professional school students pay tuition).

Copyright and Science

I imagine the academic publishing industry is either hurting from or worried about digital theft, just like all other publishers. But some of the pressure is coming from other quarters.

As I've discussed on this blog before, academic publishing is a strange industry. Researchers need to publicize their research. Publishers need research to publish. So researchers give their work for free to publishers on the understanding the publishers will publicize the work. The publishers print and distribute the work and retain all the money.

Fundamentally, publishers need researchers since there is no other source of research. Researchers, on the other hand, don't need publishers, they need distribution. And with the advent of the Internet, it's no longer so clear that expensive printed journals are the best method.

I'm thinking about this as I listen to a task by Kenneth Crews called "Protecting your scholarship: copyrights, publication agreements, and open access." He is currently suggesting that we negotiate our publication agreements with journals. For instance, he argued that academic authors should not be transferring their copyrights to publishers, but rather license the copyright to the publishers. This way, the authors retain ownership of the work, which would eliminate strange transactions where authors have to get permission from the publisher to quote from their own work in a future book.

This would seem to suggest that we have some bargaining power. And, as open-access options become more prevalent, it seems that we should. Has anyone reading actually negotiated a publication agreement.

The problem with studying pragmatics

(live-blogging Xprag)

In his introduction, Kai von Fintel tells an anecdote that I think sums up why it is sometimes difficult to explain what it is we do. Some time ago, Emmon Bach wrote a book for Cambridge University Press on if/then conditionals. The copy-editor sent it back, replacing every use of "if and only if" with a simple "if," saying the "and only if" was redundant.

As it turns out, although people often interpret "if" as meaning "if nd only if," that's simply not what the word means, despite our intuitions (most people interpret if you mow the lawn, I'll give you $5 as meaning if and only if you mow the lawn...).

Part of the mystery, then, is explaining why our intuitions are off. In the meantime, though, explaining what I do sometimes comes across as trying to prove the sky is blue.