Yes, once again I feel I really should have made the key right away. Lots of good questions coming in over email. Here’s the response to another one. There is no explicit definition of the interpretation of Present tense on the handout. This is mainly because Past tense seemed more exciting, so I always used …
I was just rethinking the homework Part 2, and I realized that there is a small error in the way I described the problem. Here’s the real issue: In the structure you wind up with for Part 2 (that is, for the sentence #2), one of the following conditions seems to hold: either 1) tense …
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At the end of the statement about homework 8, I said that we want to make sure that John did not find Mary is not always true. To clarify what I mean here: In our task of formalizing our intuitions about meaning, we don’t want our semantic system to predict that John did not find …
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As announced in class, homework #8 is just running through a couple of sentences using the system we went over in class (that is, with the modifications to the syntax, to the F function, with full specification of the evaluations at M,w,t,g. You can either use the definition of past tense on the bottom of …
It took me far, far longer to get this ready than I had anticipated it would, but I have now posted the clarifications for homework #7. You can download a new PDF file of it, on which I have marked the changes. Except for the change I made to the sentences about Alaska and Texas, …
I’m going back over homework 7, and I’m discovering a number of things that either weren’t clear or were even backwards. I will post a revision later today, and I’ll outline the changes here on the blog. For the moment, though, there’s not much point in working past Problem 1, because there will be substantial …
I should point out, as I’m looking at this homework I handed out again, that the two sentences in (1) (1a: Texas is bigger than Alaska, 1b: Alaska is smaller than Texas) are both false. Texas is in fact smaller than Alaska, but this need not get in the way of your answering the question. …
I’ve gotten a couple of questions about this so far, so I think I wasn’t completely clear in class. But the extra credit writeups of talks you might have attended at the BUCLD are not due tomorrow, but rather are due a week from tomorrow, on November 13. The idea is this: Write about a …
Homework 5 was prepared in a bit of a rush, and there are a couple of oddities about question #2. If you read the directions carefully, you’ll see that it is anticipated that the sentences in the problem might have more than one interpretation, based on the de re/de dicto distinction. However, when the context …
Another typo. I was trying at one point to create a plausible contradiction, but gave up, yet it seems I left a completely unrelated answer there for part e. The real answer is either of these: (p→q)∧p p→(q∧p) Incidentally, the words that would have gone with the answer I left in the key would have …
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