Past meetings

Spring 2017

  • April 14 – Jeffrey King (Philosophy, Rutgers University): “Strong contextual felicity and felicitous underspecification”
  • April 21 – Greg Kobele (Linguistics, University of Chicago): “Semantics theories of pronouns, modularized”
  • April 28 – Jason Merchant (Linguistics, University of Chicago): “Modifying the colored lambda-calculus to model negative concord and the Afrikaans clause-final negator”
  • June 2 – Carlos Cisneros (Linguistics Ph.D. candidate, University of Chicago): “Anti-episodicity as a general constraint on even just“
  • June 5 – Julian Grove (Linguistics Ph.D candidate, University of Chicago): “Composing presuppositions 2”

Winter 2017

  • January 27 – Julian Grove (Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics, University of Chicago): “Composing presuppositions”
  • February 24 – Rachel Rudolph: “Searching for the perceptual source”
  • March 3 – Ryan Simonelli (Ph.D. student in Philosophy, University of Chicago): “Indexicality, opacity, and perspectivality”

Fall 2016

  • October 14 – Joshua Knobe (Philosophy/Cognitive Science, Yale University): “Moral disagreement and moral semantics”
  • November 4 – Patrick Muñoz (Ph.D. student in Linguistics, University of Chicago): “Experiential evidence and norms of assertion”
  • November 11 – Thomas Grano (Linguistics, Indiana University): “A progress report on intention reports”
  • November 18 – Tamara Vardomskaya (Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics, University of Chicago): “Subjective find explained by experience and presentive force”
  •  December 2 – Greg Kobele (Linguistics, University of Chicago): “LF-interpretation, compositionality”

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Spring 2016

  • April 1 – Sophia Sklaviadis (Ph.D. student in Philosophy, University of Chicago): “Exemplars of honesty (i.e. felicity): can subjective ‘find’ discover? or: Can naturalness of embedding under (subjective) ‘find’ predict scalar faultlessness?”
  • April 29 – Guillaume Thomas (Linguistics, University of Toronto): “Modal Economy and the temporal orientation of circumstantial modals”
  • May 20 – Tim Grinsell (Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics, University of Chicago): “Degrees of abstraction in degree abstraction”
  • May 27 – Michela Ippolito (Linguistics, University of Toronto): “Constraints on the embeddability of epistemic modals”
  • June 3 – Yael Sharvit (Linguistics, University of California Los Angeles): “Some remarks on sequence of tense”
  • June 10 – Nathan Klinedinst (University College London): “Coreference and identity” (joint work with Daniel Rothschild)

Winter 2016

  • February 5 – Tamara Vardomskaya (Ph.D. candidate in Linguistics, University of Chicago): “Subjectivity and find: a matter of perception or attitude?”
  • February 19 – Kevin Davey (Philosophy, University of Chicago): “Truth, subderivations, and the Liar sentence”
  • February 26 – Josef Stern (Philosophy, University of Chicago): “Quotations and pictures”
  • March 11 – Aidan Gray (Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago): “Names in strange places”

Fall 2015

  • October 2 – John MacFarlane (Philosophy, UC Berkeley): “Vagueness as indecision”
  • October 30 – Emily Hanink and Julian Grove (Ph.D. students in Linguistics, University of Chicago): “Restrictive relatives, ‘same,’ and the semantics of the German definite article”
  • November 13 – Orest Xherija (Ph.D. student in Linguistics, University of Chicago): “Before without after: nonveridicality, disjunction and context dependence”
  • November 20 – Paolo Santorio (Philosophy, University of Leeds): “Alternatives and truth-makers in conditional semantics”
  • December 4 – Patrick Munoz (Ph.D. student in Linguistics, University of Chicago): “Faultless disagreement and the determination of contextual parameters”

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Spring 2015

  • April 3 – Brian Weatherson (Philosophy, University of Michigan) “Defending the standard view of borderline cases”
  • April 17 – Andrea Beltrama (PhD student in Linguistics, UChicago) “Pragmatic intensification between semantic and social meaning”
  • April 24 – Hrafn Asgeirsson (Philosophy, University of Iceland) “Can facts about legal practice adjudicate between theories of vagueness?”
  • May 29 – John MacKay (Philosophy, University of Wisconsin) “Explaining the actuality operator away”
  • June 5 – Sophia Sklaviadis (PhD Student in Philosophy, UChicago) “Dimensions and degrees of virtue: when to agree, and when to agree to disagree”

Winter 2015

  • January 16 – Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari (Linguistics, UChicago, Institut Jean Nicod) “The future in Greek and Italian: metaphysical and epistemic dimensions”
  • February 6 – Tamara Vardomskaya (PhD student in Linguistics, UChicago) “Evidential subjectivity”
  • February 20 – Patrick Munoz (PhD student in Linguistics, UChicago) “Names in de re belief reports: problems with conceptual covers and a new analysis of identity”
  • February 27 – Book discussion with Peter Lasersohn

Autumn 2014

  • October 31 – Fabrizio Cariani (Philosophy, Northwestern University) “Predictive sentences and modality”
  • November 14 – Rebekah Baglini (PhD student in Linguistics, UChicago) “Non-mereological semantics”
  • November 21 – Mandy Simons (Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon University) “How questions and answers cohere”
  • December 12 – Matt Teichman (PhD student in Philosophy, UChicago) “Language and ontology”

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Spring 2014

  • April 4 – Michael Glanzberg (Philosophy, Northwestern University) “Context dependence and discourse effects in knowledge attributions”
  • April 25 – Jonathan Cohen (Philosophy, University of California San Diego) “Failure-free extrasemantic content”
  • May 2 – Daniel Rothschild (Philosophy, University College London) “Epistemic contradictions”
  • May 9 – Sarah Moss (Philosophy, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor) “On the semantics and pragmatics of epistemic vocabulary”
  • May 16 – Anthony S. Gillies (Philosophy, Rutgers University) “What (deontic) hafta reveals about preferences”
  • May 23 – Malte Willer (Philosophy, UChicago) “Another case for dynamic conditionals”
  • May 30 – Matt Teichman (PhD student in Philosophy, UChicago) “Linguistic returns”
  • June 6 – Timothy Grinsell (PhD student in Linguistics, UChicago) [title TBA]

Winter 2014

  • January 31 – Peet Klecha (PhD student in Linguistics, UChicago) “Temporal orientation and modality”
  • February 7 – Rebekah Baglini (PhD student in Linguistics, UChicago) “States, degrees, and the semantics of lexical categories”
  • February 21 – Karen Lewis (Philosophy, Columbia University) “Elusive counterfactuals”
  • February 28 – Michael Franke (ILLC, Amsterdam) “Optimal use of gradable adjectives: the effect of scale structure & prior expectations”
  • March 14 – Anubav Vasudevan (Philosophy, UChicago) “On two paradoxes of information”

Autumn 2013 

  • October 4 – Rebekah Baglini (PhD student in Linguistics, UChicago) “States in the semantic ontology”
  • October 11 – Haim Gaifman (Philosophy, Columbia University) “Procedural names and descriptive names”
  • October 18 – Michael Devitt (Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center) “What makes a property semantic”
  • November 1 – Kjell Johan Sæbø (ILOS, University of Oslo) “Lessons from descriptive indexicals”
  • November 19 – Donka Farkas (Linguistics, University of California Santa Cruz) “Assertions, polar questions, and the land in between”
  • November 22 – Joshua Mendelsohn (PhD student in Philosophy, UChicago) “Term kinds in Aristotelian modal logic”

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Spring 2013

  • April 5 – Heather Burnett (Linguistics, Montréal & Institute Jean Nicod, ENS)
  • May 6 – Galit Sassoon (LLCC, Hebrew U) “Size adjectives as adjectives”
  • May 17 – Chieu Nguyen (PhD student in Linguistics, UChicago)
  • May 24 – Haim Gaifman (Philosophy, Columbia)
  • June 7 – Ryan Bochnak, Peet Klecha (PhD students in Linguistics, UChicago)

Winter 2013

  • January 18 – Daniel Lassiter (Psychology, Stanford) “Compositional probabilistic models of vagueness: computational implementation, experimental evidence, and cognitive implications”
  • January 25 – Ryan Bochnak (PhD student in Linguistics, UChicago) “Comparatives and cross-linguistic semantics”
  • February 8 – Matt Teichman (PhD student in Philosophy, UChicago) “Characterizing kinds”
  • February 22 – Walter Pedersen (Linguistics, McGill) “A scalar analysis of again“
  • March 1 –  Stewart Shapiro (Philosophy, Ohio State) “Vagueness, open-texture, and retrievability”
  • March 8 – Nic Koziolek (PhD student in Philosophy, UChicago) “Towards a Neo-Fregean theory of propositional attitude ascriptions”

Autumn 2012

  • October 26 – Timothy Grinsell (PhD student in Linguistics, UChicago) “Votes for vagueness: why the English progressive is vague, and what Congress can do about it”
  • November 9 – David Etlin (Philosophy, Groningen) “Vague Desire: the Sorites and the Money Pump”
  • November 16 – Kristina Liefke (PhD student in Philosophy, Munich) “A single-type semantics for natural language”
  • November 30 – Ezra Cook (PhD student in Philosophy, Northwestern) “Epistemic Modals and Common Ground”

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Spring 2012
  • March 30 – Friederike Moltmann (ENS, Paris) “The semantics of ‘cases'”
  • April 13 – Will Starr (Cornell) “A preference semantics for imperatives”
  • April 27 – Seth Yalcin (Berkeley) “Alternatives in the analysis of epistemic and deontic modalities”
  • May 4 – Scott AnderBois (Connecticut)
  • May 11 – Tim Grinsell (Chicago, grad student)
  • May 25 – Silver Bronzo (Chicago, grad student) “Frege on multiple analyses and the essential articulatedness of thought”
  • June 1 – Rebekah Baglini (Chicago, grad student)
Winter 2012
  • January 13 – Bridget Copley (CNRS, Paris) “Connecting events”
  • January 27 – Elizabeth Smith (Northwestern) “Some observations, revisions, and puzzles in the semantics of comparative correlatives”
  • February 10 – Peter Klecha (Chicago, grad student) “Modals, conditionals, and imprecision”
  • February 16 – Eva Csipak (Göttingen, grad student) “Pizza subjunctives, plans and alternatives”
Autumn 2011
  • October 14 – Rachel Goodman (Chicago, graduate student) “Do acquaintance theorists have an attitude problem?”
  • October 28 – Anna Chernilovskaya (Chicago and Utrecht University, grad student) “How to express yourself: on discourse effects of wh-exclamatives”
  • November 4 – Geoff Nunberg (UC Berkeley) “A minimal semantics for derogatives, or being mean without meaning”
  • November 11 – Rick Nouwen (Utrecht University) “On wh-exclamatives and “noteworthiness”
  • November 16 – Maria Aloni (University of Amsterdam) “Modal inferences in marked indefinites”
  • November 18 – Katerina Chatzopoulos (Chicago, graduate student) “Redefining Jespersen’s cycle”

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Spring 2010

  • April 2 – Judith Tonhauser (Linguistics, OSU) “Temporal anaphora of noun phrases“
  • April 16 – Yaron McNabb (UChicago) “Toward a combined syntactic and semantic account of degree expressions“
  • May 14 – Dan Sperber (Institut Nicod, Paris) “The myth of scalar implicatures”
  • May 21 – Tim Grinsell (UChicago) “Inertia worlds and problems of causation for the semantics of the progressive”
  • May 28 – Elena Castroviejo Miró (UChicago) “An analysis of ‘so’ that is not ‘enough'”
  • June 4 – Matt Teichman (UChicago) “Casting Slurs”
Winter 2010
  • January 29 – Kai von Fintel (Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT) “The Subjectivity of Conditionals in a New Light”
  • February 19 – Chris Kennedy (Linguistics, U Chicago) “Where does relativity come from?”
  • February 26 – Magdalena Schwager (University of Göttingen) “Imperatives as moody modals”
  • March 5 – Craige Roberts (Linguistics, OSU) “RETRIEVABILITY and Definite Noun Phrases”
  • March 8 – Ryan Bochnak (U Chicago) “Two sources of scalarity within the verb phrase”
  • March 12 – Valentine Hacquard (Linguistics, Maryland) “Context, events, and the interpretation of modals”
Autumn 2009
  • October 15 – Robin Jeshion (Dept. of Philosophy, UC Riverside) “Singuar Thought: Names, Descriptions, and Discourse Representation Theory” (6pm)
  • October 23 – Peter Klecha (Graduate Student, Linguistics) “The Meaning of Predictions”
  • November 6 – Nat Hansen (Graduate Student, Philosophy) “A Slugfest of Intuitions: Contextualism and Experimental Design”
  • November 9-11 – François Recanati (CNRS, Paris) (4.30 pm, Franke Institute for the Humanities)
  • November 12-13 – Workshop on Perspectival Thought (Franke Institute for the Humanities)

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Spring 2009

  • April 3 – Palle Leth. “Predicate Terms in Context”
  • April 24 – Tommy Grano. “English embedding verbs and the semantics of nonfinite complementation”
  • May 1 – Peter Hylton (UIC). “The Idea of a Logically Perfect Language in Analytic Philosophy” (joint meeting with Wittgenstein Workshop)
  • May 22 – Gillian Russell (Washington University). “Necessity and the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction”
  • May 29 – Jasmin Urban. “Open questions, modality and truth relativity”
  • June 5 – Angelika Kratzer (Massachussetts). “Epistemic modality and context dependency”

Winter 2009

  • January 30 – Stefan Kaufmann (Northwestern). “Unconditionals are Conditionals”
  • February 13 – Itamar Francez. “Making it implicit: The dynamics of context sensitivity in existentials”
  • February 20 – Aidan Gray. “What do Alfreds have in common?”
  • February 27 – Chris Kennedy. “On ‘Average’ “
Autumn 2008
  • October 24 – Paul Portner (Dept of Linguistics, Georgetown University).  “Scales of Probability”
  • November 14 – Nat Hansen (Grad. Student, Dept of Philosophy, University of Chicago). “Color adjectives and Radical Contextualism”
  • November 21 – Delia Graff Fara. (Dept of Philosophy, Princeton University). “De-re Modality: Identity Theory versus Counterpart Theory”
  • December 5 – Sara Bosworth (Grad. Student, Dept of Philosophy University of Chicago). “Meaning Internalism and Content Externalism”
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Spring 2007
  • April 6 – Chris Potts, University of Massachusetts, Amherst “Expressive content and semantic theory”
  • April 27 – Aidan Gray, Chicago “Having your cake and also eating it: Quantification and non-contradiction in ‘On denoting‘”
  • May 11 – TBD
  • May 25 -Chris Barker, New York University “The case against E-type donkey pronouns”
  • June 1 – Jason Stanley, Rutgers University
Winter 2007
Autumn 2006