Philosophy of Language and Linguistics Workshop


Seminar at UCD, December 14, 2006

Speech Sounds and Locus of Linguistic Significance


Barry Smith

Novel sentences
Yet not noise
Direct perception not hypothesizing
Stop asking hard questions
Learning: drilling?
Wrong questions
Dehaene-Lambetz
McDowell
Language and grammar:


Where are sounds? Nowhere special

On Russel's Arguments against Frege's Theory of Sense


James Levine

Differences between Russel and Frege:

  1. aboutness
  2. Gray's Elegy Argument

No subject => no truth value
Frege: refer == bedeuten
Both accept the concept of aboutness
Russel changed mind after Principles of Mathematics and before On Denoting
Frege went the opposite direction
Transparency of names

Representing Events and Situations as Strings


Tim Fernando

Regular expressions
Finite State Machines
Interval reduction
pi: projection
phi: fluents
Less is more: constraints semantics
Telicity
Pat stopped the car before it hit the tree
The car hit the tree after Pat stopped it

Ellipsis Sites as Definite Descriptions


Paul Elbourne

Perfective Aspect and the Metaphysics of Events


James Higginbotham

Progressive, perfect, tense
English perfect purely aspectual
Double access: John said that Mary is pregnant

Conférences ToC
Marc Girod