Reading for M 9/24: Karttunen 1976; Haviland & Clark 1974

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For M 9/24, please read the following two articles, which may both be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website.

1.  Karttunen, Lauri. 1976. Discourse referents. In James D. McCawley (ed.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 7: Notes from the Linguistic Underground, 363-385. New York: Academic Press.

2.  Haviland, Susan & Herbert Clark. 1974. What’s new? Acquiring new information as a process in comprehension. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13: 512-521.

Group Presentations: Papers now posted; Preferences requested by Saturday, 9/15

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As I said during our first class meeting, each of you will participate in a group presentation at some point during the semester, during which you and the other members of your group will be responsible for summarizing and discussing one of the week’s readings.  There will be five group presentations in total, each devoted to a different course reading.  The individual presentation dates and papers are listed on your printed syllabus, as well as the “Schedule” section of this website . There will be at least two students assigned to every paper.  The longer papers will have more students assigned to them than the shorter papers, so that the work is distributed fairly evenly.

I’ve now posted the five papers at the “Readings” section of our course website.   You should (if you so desire) have a look at them this week, to see if any strikes you as particularly interesting.

By this Saturday, September 15, please send me a ranked list of your preferences regarding the group presentations.  If there are any dates on which you absolutely cannot present, due to scheduling conflicts or other substantial time commitments, please include this information as well.  And if there are any papers that you would really like to present, then you should include that information as well, and I’ll try my best to accommodate your request.

Since the first presentation is scheduled for September 24, I would like to be able to announce the presentation groups at our next class meeting (September 17).

Reading for M 9/17: Huang 2007, Ch. 5 & Partee 1989: §1-4

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For M 9/17, please read the following two items, which may both be downloaded from the “Readings” section of this website.  (Note:  the “Readings” section is password-protected; you can find the password on the first page of your printed syllabus.)

1.  Huang, Yan. 2007. Pragmatics, Chap. 5 (‘Deixis’).

(Note that §5.3 of the Huang chapter is optional; we will not be discussing that material in class.)

2.  Partee, Barbara. 1989. Binding implicit variables in quantified contexts, §1-4 only.

(Note that the remaining sections of the Partee reading presuppose a familiarity with certain formal theories of semantics that you have not yet learned about.  So, our class discussion will focus on the first four sections of this paper only.)