Barbara H. Partee
Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy
Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
Abstracts:
Formal semantics and pragmatics: Origins, issues, impact.
“Semantics” can mean quite different things in different contexts; fields concerned
with semantics are as diverse as psychology, law, computer science, lexicography,
logic, philosophy, and linguistics. “Pragmatics” is an equally wide-ranging term, with
applications in politics and ethics as well as in linguistics and philosophy. Formal
semantics and pragmatics as it has developed over the last 40+ years has been shaped
by fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, philosophers, and
logicians.
In this talk I’ll reflect on developments in semantics in linguistics and philosophy
starting in the 1960’s and the growth of formal semantics and formal pragmatics. I’ll
touch in passing on innovations and “big ideas” that have shaped the development of
formal semantics and its relation to syntax and to pragmatics over the decades. And
I’ll describe some of the ways that advances and debates in formal semantics and
pragmatics have been and are connected with foundational issues in linguistic theory,
philosophy, and cognitive science.
Compositionality and Coercion: The Dynamics of Adjective Meanings
The focus of the talk is the dynamic interaction of meaning and context. The
challenge faced by rule-based approaches such as formal semantics is how to account
for context-dependent meaning shifts without abandoning compositionality. I argue
that in fact compositionality can be seen as one of the driving forces in contextsensitive meaning shifts. My case study is the semantics of different kinds of
adjectives. One factor observed by Hans Kamp years ago is the interplay of contextdependence and intensionality: why skillful is intensional but large is not, even
though we may consider a large house not to be a large building. I will offer a solution
to some puzzles of “privative” adjectives like fake, counterfeit and “redundant”
adjectives like real, arguing that adjective meanings are more constrained than was
appreciated in earlier work. Facts about “NP-splitting” in Polish cast serious doubt on
the standard hierarchy of adjectives, and the data become much more orderly if
privative adjectives are reanalyzed as subsective adjectives. This revised account
requires the possibility of coerced expansion of the denotation of the noun to which an
adjective is applied. One of the broader implications of this perspective is that there
should in principle be no conflict between the goals of “formal” and “cognitive”
approaches to semantics, although there are of course differences in priorities and in
favored forms of argumentation.