LSA.228 | Direct Compositionality: Binding and Ellipsis

Irene Heim and Pauline Jacobson
TR 4:50-6:30
location: 32-141
course web site: http://lsa.dlp.mit.edu/Class/228

This dialogue seminar will examine some implications of a directly compositional and variable-free approach to phenomena of binding and ellipsis.  Such an approach assumes that the syntax builds expressions while the semantics directly supplies a model-theoretic interpretation of each expression as it is built.  It moreover assumes that semantics makes no use of assignment functions or of indices in the syntax.  We will begin by showing how these assumptions shape the analysis of phenomena such as binding, ellipsis, extraction, scope, and the interaction of these.  The resulting proposals then will be critically compared with competing analyses of a more standard kind, which make crucial reference to a mediating level of Logical Form and a syntactic encoding of variables and binding relations.

Prerequisites: some familiarity with model-theoretic semantics (such as an introductory course in formal semantics)