Drafts Available Upon Request
Keeping Count of Copredications - This is about the puzzle of copredication, the quest to find plausible semantic values for sentences like lunch was delicious but lasted for hours. Approaches that reject the underlying metaphysics, though attractive, have difficulty making the right predictions about counting sentences. I propose a solution to accommodate the counting data by suggesting that we don't count entities, but cells of a partition on those entities.
How to Reason Polysemously - Also about the puzzle of copredication I point to striking entailments they fail to give rise to Lunch is some pasta vongole, and Lunch had guests, entails the coprediation Lunch was some pasta vongole and had guests, but not Some pasta vongole had guests. I also argue this inference data is no problem for truth-conditional semantic theories. To capture this I propose copredications are instead the result of silent predication operators in logical form.
(there is a draft available, although I'm in the process of splitting this paper in two).
In Preparation
What is #? - A paper about felicity judgements: the state of mind we're in we determine an utterance like It's raining but it might not be is marked or unacceptable. I argue that these judgements are conative (like disgust) and tease out this view's implications for the evidential role of intuitions in linguistic theory.
Truth-Conditional Semantics Tells No Lies (joint work with Kenneth Black) - we argue on the basis of sentence like `The Bible is true' that natural-language true applies first and foremost to objects, and not sentences or propositions in English. We then draw some conclusions about this result for the liar paradox (liar sentences fail because `true' is a presupposition trigger), as well as bigger-picture questions about the nature of truth-conditional semantics (that it's surprisingly not that invested in truth.)