This workshop will bring together recent work in formal semantics that is inspired by and in dialogue with Matthew Mandelkern’s forthcoming book, Bounded Meaning. Our goal is to make sense of patterns and puzzles which point to the influence of non-truth-conditional, local information on the interpretation of modals, conditionals and anaphora. This promises, in turn, to advance our understanding of the nature and dynamics of local information, how it interacts with our core semantic and pragmatic competence, and help us evaluate the prospects of various related theoretical approaches, including dynamic semantics, situation semantics, and extensions of truth-conditional approaches with local context parameters.
(Key to illustration: DALLE's vision of the workshop)
Dates: May 3-4, 2024
Location: E370 South College, UMass Amherst
Organizers: Guillermo Del Pinal & Alejandro Pérez Carballo
To help us plan, receive e-handouts, etc., please register HERE!
Friday May 3:
10 - 11:45am: Matt Mandelkern (NYU), 'Bounded Meaning: tl;dr'
Lunch break
1.30 - 3:15pm: Calum McNamara (Michigan), ‘Learning “if”’
Coffee break
3.45 - 5:30pm: Melissa Fusco (Columbia), 'Decision and tenable conditionals'
Saturday May 4:
10-11:45am: Angelika Kratzer (UMass Amherst), `Embedding modals’
Lunch break + Poster session (Marina Perez Del Valle, UMass Amherst Philosophy; Andrea Matticchio, UMass Amherst Linguistics; Richard Roth NYU Philosophy; Yuyan Tan, UMass Amherst Philosophy)
2-3:45pm: Paolo Santorio (Maryland), ‘Local contexts for historical modality’
Coffee break
4.15-6pm: Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard), `How dynamic is anaphora?’
Workshop party will be at Elli & Guie’s house starting @ 7pm.