Recent content on semantics etc.
The bad news: The venerable semantics journal Natural Language Semantics founded by Irene Heim and Angelika Kratzer has been discontinued by Springer. The very good news: The editorial team has started a successor journal Semantics of Natural Languages , which is a diamond open access journal published by Open Library of Humanities. The editors have posted an open letter . The first accepted…
In the summer of 2022 (and again briefly in 2023), I was given the opportunity to write a series of 500-word columns for the “In a word” feature in the Monitor Weekly , filling in while my friend Melissa Mohr was taking a sabbatical to work on her next book. (If you don’t know her book on swearing, “Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing”, you should definitely check…
This summer, I published seven short columns on semanticky topics. More here: https://kaivonfintel.org/inaword .
The goal Still: making it through the pandemic Upcoming Fall 2022 : Teaching a first-year discovery class called “The search for meaning” Spring 2023 : Co-teaching with Amir Anvari: (i) the second semester PhD class on advanced semantics, and (ii) a seminar on the philosophy of semantics. Ongoing Activities Founding co-editor (with David Beaver) of Semantics & Pragmatics . Editorial…
Some notes about getting in touch with me The only realiable way to contact me is via email. I typically respond within 24-48 hours during working hours (9am-5pm on weekdays). If we know each other (we’ve met in real life, you’ve taken classes with me, etc.), please email me with whatever is on your mind. If you are from “the media” and wish to interview me or commission a…
Venue Class taught at The 4nd Crete Summer School of Linguistics University of Crete, Gallos, Rethymnon, Greece July 16 to July 29, 2022 Instructor Kai von Fintel Course description X-marking is a term proposed by von Fintel & Iatridou 2022 for morphological markers that have a characteristic set of uses crosslinguistically, at least the following three: (i) they are used to distinguish…
Must read: an article on surveillance publishing by Jefferson Pooley See also: a blog post by John Baez As Baez concludes: “So, the definition of ‘diamond open access’ should include: no surveillance.”
I’ve uploaded two short notes on the semantics of desire ascriptions. “On the monotonicity of desire ascriptions” is from a few years ago. It is cited in a recent paper by Paul Portner and Aynat Rubinstein and I figured I should make it available, since who knows if I ever get around to making a real paper out of it. “How weak is your want ?” contains a few…
The systems we study in our field are manifested not just in spoken language but in other modalities as well, most importantly in sign languages. Other modalities as well (though often secondary in some sense) exist: written language, of course, whistled language, etc. So, it’s unfortunate that much of our terminology is not really modality-neutral but presupposes the spoken modality:…
The bibliography house style of Semantics and Pragmatics (S&P) has finally been released on CTAN: http://www.ctan.org/pkg/biblatex-unified . Any issues with using the style can be raised at the Github site for the package: https://github.com/semprag/biblatex-sp-unified .
On October 27, 2005, I posted a short item on my blog about the then new open access journal Logical Methods in Computer Science and wrote “Maybe this will inspire us to get something similar off the ground in semantics etc.” In my email inbox soon after, I found an email from David Beaver saying “Do you mean it?” More than a year of discussions and loads of work ensued. We…
Venue Class taught at The 3nd Crete Summer School of Linguistics University of Crete, Gallos, Rethymnon, Greece July 13–26, 2019 Instructor Kai von Fintel Course description This intermediate to advanced class will review what is known about exclusive markers like only and its cousins (in English and cross-linguistically). Topics include dimensions of meaning, mirativity, NPI licensing, the…
[crossposted to Language Log ] Question #1 on this November’s ballot in Massachusetts concerns a proposed law to limit the number of patients that can be assigned to a nurse at any one time. More than $15 million dollars have already been spent on campaigning about this question. Lawn signs on both sides of the debate abound in the state: Now, inquiring minds might wonder: what is it, do…
Venue Class taught at The 2nd Crete Summer School of Linguistics University of Crete, Gallos, Rethymnon, Greece July 16-27, 2018 Instructors Kai von Fintel Sabine Iatridou Course description In this intermediate/advanced class, we will discuss classic and current work on the semantics and, to a lesser extent, syntax of desire constructions. We will mostly focus on wanting, wishing, hoping,…
Question: How do you alphabetize your name in bibliographies? Good question. I can only tell you what my personal rules are. Many gory details below. But the simple gist is this: my last name is “von Fintel” but it should be alphabetized under “F” (as if the “von” was silent). There are probably differences between German von , Dutch van , Belgian van , French…
In the fall of 1984, just back from half a year at Cambridge University, I switched universities from Münster to Köln. While in Cambridge, I had decided to study linguistics in addition to English and Philosophy. I did eventually take some intro classes, but what really sucked me in was an advanced seminar offered by Professor Paul Otto Samuelsdorff, who somehow had a manuscript copy of…
This is the website of Kai von Fintel. I’m a professor of linguistics at MIT . I work on meaning. I have a wife, two adult children, two cats, and a dog. I live in an intentional community ( Mosaic Commons Cohousing ) in Berlin, Massachusetts. I am a runner. I like soccer, a lot. I was born on a cold winter’s night in a small village on the Lüneburg Heath in Northern Germany. My…
[This is a joint post by Eric Baković and Kai von Fintel , crossposted from Language Log .] Regular Language Log readers will be familiar with our continuing coverage of the goings-on at what we in the linguistics community have given the name Zombie Lingua -- the Elsevier journal once universally known by its still-official name, Lingua -- a journal that we believe should have been allowed to die…
[This post is co-authored by Eric Bakovic and me, cross-posted from Language Log .] We have been following an ongoing story involving Zombie Lingua with great interest. For those unaware of it, and perhaps for those with only some awareness of it, here is what we currently know. It will help to start by identifying the main characters in this story: Islam Youssef , Associate Professor of English…
[These are some thoughts as I’m getting ready to teach our first semester graduate introduction to semantics. This fall, I’m also serving as acting Graduate Program Director, while Sabine is on sabbatical leave. So, I figured I should write down some points that I often address in sermons in introductory classes. Let me know if you have comments or disagree with anything.] Any…
Prompted by an exchange with Brooke Larson on twitter , I decided it was time to check on the health of everyone’s favorite zombie, the journal Lingua , whose editorial team defected en masse to start the open access journal Glossa . Since January this year, Zombie Lingua has been edited by “Interim Editor-in-chief” Harry Whitaker. Since January 1, the journal has published an…
[Reposted from the S&P Editors Blog ] Visitors to S&P’s homepage will see our newest feature in action. Accepted papers for which we have a LaTeX source file will, with the authors’ permission, now immediately be published in an “early access” version. They will already be assigned their final DOI, so they can be linked and referred to as officially published. This way they…
[Sorry, couldn’t resist that title.] My favorite classes at the Hittorf-Gymnasium in Münster were Math, Chemistry, Latin, and Philosophy. My philosophy teacher, Herr Ledwig, in particular, was formative. We read lots of seminal European philosophy (Aristotle, Descartes, Vico, Weber, …). I spent a lot of time in the public library looking at and borrowing plenty of stuff that was a…
[Reproducing a statement published this morning in the MIT Linguistics Newsletter:] Below is a statement from the MIT Linguistics Faculty on open access and the new journal Glossa . We’re following our colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee . Similar statements are being considered on other campuses. For background, you can consult this post at Language Log and a statement from…
These are times of upheaval in scholarly communication. One thing that seems clear is that open access will prevail: since most scientific research is directly and indirectly funded through public money, it is simply inescapable that the public should have open access to the results of the research. And it is also inescapable that there needs to be careful stewardship of that public money and that…
My sources say that Elsevier is now actively trying to recruit scholars for the editorial team of Zombie Lingua (see these Language Log posts for the background: " Lingua is dead. Long live Glossa ! ", Lingua Disinformation" ). Here’s a redacted sample of what they are sending to people: Subject: Editorial Position Opportunity Dear Professor […] First please let me introduce myself as…
Linguists today received a misleading email from Elsevier sent to everyone who has ever submitted to or reviewed for Lingua , the journal whose editorial board has decided to not work with Elsevier anymore and restart the journal as the open-access journal Glossa . Here is Elsevier’s email: Dear Lingua Authors and Reviewers As I am sure you are aware, as of the end of December 2015 the…
In case you’re not glued to social media 24/7, you may have missed some of the coverage of the Lingua → Glossa Affair. Media coverage after the early Inside Higher Ed article has included: a statement of support of the Lingua team by Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities an article at Ars Technica , with some rather uninformed trolling in the…
There is exciting news from the open access revolution. [ Previously: ] A few years ago, I put up some relevant short notes, focussing to some extent on Elsevier’s particularly egregious enmity towards open access: “Attach from big money publishers” and “News from the open access revolution” . Especially relevant is Elsevier’s rear-guard action against open…
S&P asks its reviewers to overcome the discipline’s culture of procrastination and supply reviews within a default of 4 weeks (sometimes more for especially complex or long papers). We try to repay reviewers in two ways that we consider best practices: Reviewers are copied on editorial decisions. They are sent the editor’s feedback to the author and copies of all the reviews. Reviewers…
S&P makes a point of keeping reviewers informed about the fate of papers they review, copying them on the editorial decision, forwarding the other reviews, and letting them know if and when the paper gets published. We think that reviewers deserve to be kept in the loop. I get annoyed when I work on reviews for other journals and am not at all kept in the loop. At this time of the year, I begin to…
This is the Apple Watch edition of my new Purchase Prevention Program, trying to keep me from early adopting. Smart watches are going to be the new hotness, especially once the Apple Watch is out. I’m going to stick with my trusted basic Citizen watch for a while longer. Here’s what would persuade me: standalone functioning, does not need a phone nearby (don’t want to lug…
Note: at the upcoming LSA annual meeting in Portland, I will be part of a session about the publication process. My role will be to talk about open access in linguistics. I just remembered that I had lying around a draft guide to publishing articles. So, here’s the draft. I’d be very grateful for feedback so I can improve this document but also figure out what makes sense to talk about…
Those of us trying to figure out the meaning of deontic modals, especially the distinction between weak and strong necessity, should just pack in and go on vacation. There’s an official RFC 1 that settles the issue. Scott Bradner , all around internet wizard at Harvard, wrote RFC 2119 “Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels” in 1997. It has this definitive…
The Art and Craft of Semantics is a Festschrift for Irene Heim that students, colleagues, and friends presented to her yesterday, October 30, 2014, on the occasion of her 60th birthday. I have two co-authored contributions in the collection: The definiteness paper is a brief report on a rumored account that’s been floating around for a while. I hope there’ll be follow-up work. The…
The MIT Libraries just made available a new website displaying various statistics about our Open Access DSpace repository . I have three papers in that archive. Here are the download counts for those papers: And here is a graph with the cumulative download count over time: I can’t compare this to the download numbers that these articles get at the official publisher sites because publishers…
Going through boxes of old stuff, I came across the April 12, 1988 telegram(!) that told me that I had been accepted into the UMass PhD program in linguistics:
A famous example by Sperber & Wilson shows the context dependency of conversational inferences: He : Will you have some coffee? She : Coffee would keep me awake. Depending on whether one surmises that she would like to stay awake, one can infer either a positive or negative answer to whether she would like some coffee. The April 7, 2014 issue of the “Zits” cartoon gives us a new…
In today’s Boston Globe baseball preview section: “Jake Stahl (1912), Ed Barrow (1918), Terry Francona (2004), and John Farrell (2013) are the only Red Sox managers to win the World Series in their first season.” Hmm. Yeah, no. The Red Sox have had 44 managers in their history , so when 4 of them win the World Series in their first season, does that really merit an…
Every academic department anywhere should designate one of their members to be Publication Advisor. This will be someone who, with the help of their local librarians and whoever else can be helpful, informs themselves about the current state of scholarly publishing. They will learn about their institution’s Open Access Policy (if it exists; otherwise, they may initiate discussions about…
It’s still early days but the open-access revolution in linguistics continues. Stefan Müller and Martin Haspelmath, with seed funding from the German Science Foundation (DFG), have started an open access monograph press in linguistics called Language Science Press . E-books will be free to authors and readers. There will be a print-on-demand option as well. There are several series planned,…
This is the second part of my reconstruction of my academic lineage, in which we encounter someone whose dissertation defense lasted seven hours and someone else who basically compiled his dissertation the night before it was due. I am still learning quite a bit about each of these academic ancestors of mine, but because this could take a while, I wanted to present at least the outlines of the…
Two quick links: I was interviewed on the site “How to become a professor” on the topic of “How to become a professor in linguistics” . My colleague Caspar Hare appeared on the podcast “You’re the expert” , representing normative ethics. Highly recommended (and thoroughly enjoyable).
Here’s an interesting article [HT: Steve Crandall ]: Ciampolini, Mario, David Lovell-Smith, Timothy Kenealy, Riccardo Bianchi: 2013. Hunger can be taught: Hunger Recognition regulates eating and improves energy balance. International Journal of General Medicine . 6:465-478. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.2147/IJGM.S40655 . Why do I find this interesting? Any help with weight control is truly…
[This is a revision of a 2003 blog post.] A student in my 2003 advanced semantics class asked about C.L. Hamblin, who in semantics is mostly — and justly — famous for his early montagovian paper on questions: C.L. Hamblin: 1973. “Questions in Montague English” , Foundations of Language 10: 41–53. [By the way, Foundations of Language was the precursor journal of Linguistics…
A couple of months ago, Randall Munroe’s xkcd web comic explained the design of the Saturn V rocket using only the thousand most common words of English: “the Up Goer Five explained using only the ten hundred words people use the most often” . Explaining hard things in simple language has now become an internet meme . Just this morning, I found Walton Jones explaining his…
We are deeply saddened by Aaron Swartz’s death, and send our condolences to all who knew him. We are very mindful of his commitment to the open access movement. It inspires our own commitment to work for a situation where academic knowledge is freely available, so that others are not menaced by the kind of prosecution that he faced. We encourage everyone to visit www.rememberaaronsw.com , a…
[Crossposted from S&P Editors Blog ] We are excited to share good news about the future of S&P . We have been working with the LSA on moving S&P out of its current incubating stage to the next level with fuller support. This morning, the LSA Executive Committee unanimously approved an agreement to that effect. As of today, S&P is a full-fledged LSA journal, alongside Language but independent of…
[Crossposted from the S&P Editors Blog :] Semantics & Pragmatics today published an underground classic, Craige Roberts' famous paper "Information structure in discourse: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics" , which had previously been published in a volume of OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, and then circulated in a slighly edited manuscript form, but was never officially…
I received this email: Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:06:16 +0000 Subject: Curriculum Vitae for Scientists and Researchers From: Olivia Frogous olivia.frogous@gmail.com Dear Kai Von Fintel, I would like you to consider Cestagi when updating your curriculum vitae for this upcoming academic year. Cestagi is a web application that allows you to create and manage your CV with ease using academic best…