Course Description
Since the inception of modern semantics, indefinites such as those associated with the indefinite article in English (e.g. a cat) have been a focus of intense research. They have very peculiar scope and anaphoric properties, carefully sorted out over the past 30 years or so, that sets them aside from other quantificational noun phrases. For example, they: (i) systematically sustain non C-command anaphora (“donkey-anaphora”), (ii) allow for ‘long distance’ scope construal, while (iii) respecting, to some extent, constraints on ‘crossover’, and (iv) have a large number of ‘variants’ (morphemes with a related interpretation) both within and across languages (e.g. polarity sensitive items like any, epistemic variants like singular some, wh-variants, and bare argument variants). In the present course we will review our current understanding of the status of indefinites especially in connection with scope and anaphora.
Area Tags: Semantics, Syntax-Semantics Interface
(Sessions 1 & 2) Tuesday/Friday, 3:00pm – 4:20pm
Location: ILC S331
Instructor: Gennaro Chierchia
Gennaro Chierchia was born and grew up in Rome, where he got his BA. He then received his Ph.D. in linguistics at UMass, Amherst and taught in the U.S. for a decade (Brown, Cornell). He then spent some fifteen years at the University of Milan. In 2005, he came to Harvard, where he currently is Haas Foundations Professor of Linguistics. His main interests are in semantics and the syntax/semantics interface. He has worked on a range of topics (predication, anaphora, the structure of Noun Phrases, the polarity system, the theory of scalar implicatures, all from a crosslinguistic perspective). The main focus of his interests is how much of the spontaneous capacity to attach an interpretation to sound patterns (or to arrays of manual signs) depends on an innate natural logic and how much depends on other cognitive abilities (say, the capacity to extract statistical regularities, social skills, etc.).
