Instructors: Danny Fox and Martin Hackl
Room: MIT 32-D461
Time: Tuesday 2-5 PM
In this seminar we will be discussing some recent experimental work that could bear on questions in semantics and in the syntax semantics interface, as well as relevant theoretical background. We will start with questions about the nature of quantification, and in particular about the syntactic and semantics mechanisms needed for the representation of quantificational expressions. We will then move to questions pertaining to the theory of scalar implicatures and degree semantics. Throughout we will try to characterize further experimental work that could be conducted, in the hope that people will pick up on our suggestions or come up with alternatives of their own.
In addition to class participation (and reading), registered student will be asked to write a paper broadly related to the topics and methodologies discussed. Experimental work is encouraged, but not required.