Orin Percus and Graham Katz. Indexicality and compositional semantics

This class will explore the theoretical treatment of indexical and “shifting indexical” expressions, and in particular their place in a theory of how syntactic structures are interpreted compositionally.   The goal will be to use this topic to address some general issues regarding the form of semantic composition rules and the nature of interpreted structures.  Taking Kaplanian approaches as a point of departure, we will concentrate in particular on the question of where it is appropriate to assume that semantic values are determined with respect to a parameter and where it is appropriate to assume that syntactic structures contain unpronounced variables.  The empirical domain of the class will extend past “standard” examples to expressives, present tense and perspectival terms, among other expressions.

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