Questions

Mention some readings of questions, MIT, February 2013

Lectures on the semantics of questions, MIT, September 2012

Lecture 1 (Introductory remarks)

Lecture 2 (Multiple wh-questions: uniqueness, pair-list and second-order questions)

Lecture 3 (Possible ramifications for superiority)

Lecture 4 (Pair-list with universal quantifiers)

Presupposition

“Presupposition Projection, Trivalence and Relevance,” HUJI / TAU Syntax Semantics Reading Group, November/December 2011 (a continuation of the work previously presented in the Spring 2011 pragmatics class at MIT and in earlier talks at UCONN and UMD)

Maximization failure

"Negative Islands and Maximization Failure," Colloquium, MIT, 2010. (Earlier version presented at Glow 2009)

"Logic, Language and Modularity," Linguistics phenotypes, Banbury Center, May 2010

Implicatures and exhaustivity

"Economy and Embedded Exhaustification" (wtih B. Spector), Cornell, 2009

The handouts below I used for a short seminar at USC (November 04). The material was first presented in a joint seminar that I taught with Irene Heim at MIT (Fall 04). Class 5, in particular, builds on Irene's discussion of various theories of the meanings of the exhaustive operator, only.

Class 1
Class 2-3
Class 4
Class 5

Imlicature calculation, syntax or pragmatics, or both, Universidad del País Vasco, Basque Country, May 2004 (contains stuff from the Yale talk below + recent work with Martin Hackl on comparatives and degree questions).

Cyclic linearization

"Rightward Movement, Covert Movement, and Cyclic Linearization," (with D. Pesetsky), Ben-Gurion University, 2009

"Cyclic Linearization and the Typology of Movement" (with David Pesetsky, MIT) [handout]
         Related work:
          "Cyclic Linearization and Asymmetry in Scrambling" by Heejeong Ko
          "Pseudo-gapping and Cyclic Linearization" by Shoichi Takahashi

Paper now available: Cyclic Linearization of Syntactic Structure (with David Pesetsky, MIT; 2004) [Appeared in, Theoretical Linguistics, special issue on Object Shift in Scandinavian; Katalin É. Kiss, ed.]

Note: this paper contains about 1/3 of the material that will form part of a monograph, in prep. For the remaining 2/3, the best current source is the talk handout.

The Syntax and Semantics of Traces, UConn, November 2001. A version of this presented as an argument for the existence of traces: The Interpretation of Quantificational Structures -- evidence for the copy theory of traces, Workshop on Direct Compositionality, Brown University, June 2003.

Condition B: A note on Jacobson's paper, Workshop on Direct Compositionality, Brown University, June 2003.

Implicature Calculation, only, and lumping: another look at the puzzle of disjunction, Yale University, November 2003 (An earlier version of this talk titled "The Interpretation of Scalar Items: semantics, or pragmatics, or both", was given at UT Austin, and McGill)

Extraposition and Covert Movement, NYU, February 2000, joint work with Jon Nissenbaum, earlier versions of this material appeared in the proceedings of WCCFL (1999).