March 30: Friederike Moltmann

The Semantics and Philosophy of Language Workshop is happy to welcome Friederike Moltmann (ENS, Paris) for our first meeting of the Spring term.

DATE: Friday, March 30, 2012
TIME: 11:30-1:20pm
PLACE: Cobb 107

`The semantics of ‘cases’

The noun ‘case’ in English (and corresponding nouns in other European
languages) appears in a number of related constructions:

(1) a. In case it rains, we won’t go. In that case we stay home.
b. This is a case of a strange illness
c. The case of the stolen statue is a puzzling one.
d. In this country, it is rarely the case that it rains.

I will outline a unified semantic analysis of the constructions in (1a-c) on the basis of a distinctive ontology of ‘cases’ as ‘filtered’ objects. Moreover, I will argue that the construction in (1d) involves the relation of truthmaking, relating a sentence to a ‘case’.