Speaker: Ana Arregui (UMass Amherst)
Times and locations of the minicourse:
– Wednesday 4/13 2-3pm in 32‑D461
– Friday 4/15 11-1pm in 2-132
TITLE: Has the future happened?
We usually make the assumption that, contrary to the past, the future has not happened yet. There is something intuitive about this, and the intuition is reflected in various ways in the semantic literature that deals with the interpretation of future markers in language. How exactly this intuition should be taken to affect the interpretation of future markers is not a straight-forward question. Indeed, whether is not a straightforward question either. The goal of this mini-course will be to review some of the arguments in this literature and try to walk away with a clear(er) sense of which aspects of the discussion are relevant for a natural language semanticist.