Oxford University Press PublicationPaul M. Pietroski, Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Linguistics, University of Maryland
I teach at the University of Maryland in the departments of linguistics and philosophy. My primary research interests lie at the intersection of these fields.
For the 2007-2008 academic year, I was on leave as the MBB (Mind/Brain/Behavior) Fellow at Harvard University and (in the spring term) visiting professor in the Harvard Philosophy department. One especially nice perq of the "job" was a conversation with critical friends arranged by the good people at MBB.
I've been thinking, for a while now, about how grammatical structure is related to linguistic meaning. Events and Semantic Architecture (OUP 2005, pbk 2006) was a progress report. In various papers, often collaborative, I have also been defending a nativist approach to the study of human language and an internalist conception of meaning. A monograph on this last topic (Semantics without Truth Values) is, hopefully, nearing completion. Newer projects and collaborations have me thinking about numerosity, concepts, lexicalization, and the basic operations employed by the human language faculty.
In an ideal universe, I would reflect on such matters--in moderation, and only before sunset--here, leaving ample time for other things. In the actual world, it's hard not to get depressed about this and that.
Description
- Provides an original account of how the meanings of complex expressions are determined
- Designed to be accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of logic and without a background in formal semantics
- Covers a range of topics currently at the heart of debates in linguistics and philosophy about how grammatical structure is related to meaning
- Author has a record of interdisciplinary work, is familiar with a range of approaches to questions about meaning, and is known for being a good expositor
This book explores how grammatical structure is related to meaning. The meaning of a phrase clearly depends on its constituent words and how they are combined. But how does structure contribute to meaning in natural language? Does combining adjectives with nouns (as in 'brown dog') differ semantically from combining verbs with adverbs (as in 'barked loudly')? What is the significance of combining verbs with names and quantificational expressions (as in 'Fido chased every cat')? In addressing such questions, Paul Pietroski develops a novel conception of linguistic meaning according to which the semantic contribution of combining expressions is simple and uniform across constructions.
Drawing on work at the heart of contemporary debates in linguistics and philosophy, the author argues that Donald Davidson's treatment of action sentences as event descriptions should be viewed as an instructive special case of a more general semantic theory. The unified theory covers a wide range of examples, including sentences that involve quantification, plurality, descriptions of complex causal processes, and verbs that take sentential complements. Professor Pietroski also provides fresh ways of thinking about much discussed semantic generalizations that seem to reflect innately determined aspects of human languages.
Designed to be accessible to anyone with a basic knowledge of elementary logic, Events and Semantic Architecture will interest a wide range of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science.
