Overview

Our plan in this class is twofold. On the one hand, we want to go through some classics and some recent work on noun meaning, on adjectives, and on noun-adjective interactions. On the other hand, we want to ask some very general questions about the nature of lexical categories, taking nouns and adjectives as our case studies.

Requirements

Everyone who attends the class is expected to do the reading and participate in the discussion. Students taking the course for credit must also 1) choose one of the readings marked with a "*" and prepare a 15-minute presentation of the core issues, ideas and arguments; 2) write a research paper on a topic chosen in consultation with the instructors. The paper is due at the end of finals week.

The Plan

The following is a rough week-by-week plan for the course. We very well may end up diverging from it depending on the progress we make and the particular topics that people express interest in, but this provides a starting point. Since we want to allow for a certain amount of flexibility, depending on the interests and pace of the class, please check the class website regularly for updates of readings and handouts.

• September 27
  Lexical categories; phenomenology of mass/count/singular/plural nouns; basics of mereological theory
  Parsons 1970*, Doetjes 1997, ch. 2

  
  

• October 4
  Modeling nominal reference
  Link 1983, Chierchia 2010, Schwarzschild 2009 (STUBs)

  
  

• October 11
  Cross-linguistic variation in mass/count/singular/plural
  Chierchia 1998; Wilhelm 2008*; Chung 2000*; Carlson 1977* (background)

  
  

• October 18
  Morphosemantics and markedness
  Sauerland et al 2005, Grimm 2009, Farkas and de Swart 2010

  
  

• October 25
  Variation in the noun-adjective distinction
  Koontz-Garboden and Francez 2010, Koontz-Garboden and Francez 2011

  
  

• November 1
  Farkas and de Swart continued
  Intro to adjectives and adjective-noun semantics
  Kennedy in press

  
  

• November 8-15
  Vagueness and gradability in nouns and adjectives
  Morzycki 2009, Morzycki 2011*
  
  Compositional complexities in the interpretation of attributive modifiers
  Larson 1998, Gehrke and McNally 2009, Barker 2007, Kennedy and Stanley 2009
  
  NOTE: We are thinking of this as a two-session sequence of discussions, and will aim to go through the papers in the order they are presented here. We should get through Morzycki and Larson on the 8th, and then Gehrke and McNally, Barker and Kennedy and Stanley on the 15th. (Or so we hope.)

  
  

• November 22-29
  Classifiers and counting
  Cheng and Sybesma 1999, Cheng and Sybesma 2009*, Lehrer 1986*, Krifka 1989, section 3 , Schwarzschild 2006