Whamit!

The Weekly Newsletter of MIT Linguistics

LF Reading Group - 5/18 - Friederike Moltmann

Please join us this FRIDAY at 3:00 for our last LF Reading Group of the semester. Friederike Moltmann will give a talk titled “Reifying Terms”. Abstract below. Note the special day, room and time.

SPEAKER: Friederike Moltmann
TITLE: Reifying Terms
TIME: Mon. 5/18, 10:30am
ROOM: 32-D831

In this talk I will discuss the syntax and semantics of NPs of the following sort:

  1. a. the person John
    b. the name John
    c. the fictional character Hamlet
    d. the number ten
    e. the numeral ten
    f. the color green
I argue that the semantics of such NPs uniformly consists in introducing an object on the basis of a non-referential occurrence of an expression, hence they are ‘reifying terms’. I argue that numerals, color words, and simple quotations in fact generally are not referential terms and that only with the help of the construction (1) reference to expressions, colors, and numbers as objects is possible.