COMMENTATORS Gennaro Chierchia (Harvard) and Viola Schmitt (MIT / HU Berlin)
ORGANIZERS Andreea Nicolae (ZAS) and Uli Sauerland (ZAS)
DATE September 20, 2024
VENUE Noto, Sicily
CONTACT nicolae/sauerland@leibniz-zas.de
The dominant approach of formal semantic research over the last decades has been to formulate models of meaning within the typed lambda calculus. Two observations cause us to ask the question whether formal semantics has a too-many-tools (TMT) problem. 1) The formalism allows the expression of many concepts that seem to have overlapping empirical coverage such as variables, alternatives, choice-functions, logical duals with negation, and strenthening by exhaustification and lexically strong meanings. 2) Several crosslinguistic constraints on how specific meanings can be expressed such as conservativity, the adicity of predicates, the structures expressing questions, or the inventory of connectives are not explained within such models, and the accounts require appeal to other systems such as syntax or general cognition.
We seek contributions that address the TMT-question, i.e. whether semantics indeed has a TMT-problem. Specifically we welcome:
1) work that shows for specific semantic tools that their uses can overlap and draws consequences for the TMT-question
2) work that discusses one or multiple general constraints on the cross-linguistic expression of meaning in relation to the TMT-question
3) work that argues for or against possible approaches that avoid some TMT-problems in semantics
Call: Submissions must be anonymous and must not reveal the identities of the authors in any form. Abstracts should fit two pages (letter size or A4 paper, 2.54cm or 1 inch margins on all sides, 12 point font, Times New Roman), with an additional third page used exclusively for the following elements: references (obligatory), large figures or tables, as many lines as there are lines of glosses and translations in non-English glossed examples. Examples (glossed or not) should be interspersed in the text, rather than collected at the end.