The program of 2004 Milan Meeting is available (click on "program" in the navigation bar)

THE 2004 MILAN MEETING

JUNE 10 -- 12, 2004

Università degli Studi di Milano

Covert Variables at Logical Form

The 2004 Milan Meeting will take place from June 10 to June 12, 2004.

It will be held at Palazzo Feltrinelli in Gargnano, on lake Garda.

The Milan meeting is a formal semantic conference.

Invited speakers:

ANGELIKA KRATZER

FRANÇOIS RECANATI

MATS ROOTH

JASON STANLEY

The theme of the conference: Covert Variables at Logical Form

In recent times, a debate has taken place on the articulation of propositional constituents at the level of Logical Form. The debate has focused on the issue whether (a) there exist propositional constituents that are freely contributed by the context without being articulated at LF or (b) propositional constituents provided by the context and lacking overt linguistic counterparts are always realized at LF by covert variables whose values are contextually determined (see, for example, recent work by Stanley, Recanati, Perry, and others). The issue has wide ranging consequences for the nature (and existence) of a linguistic level of sentence meaning generated by the grammars of natural languages. While this debate is foundational in nature, it draws on current semantic analyses of phenomena like temporal and spatial reference, adverbial modification, domain restriction on quantification, ecc. Indeed, appeal to LF covert variables whose value is contextually furnished is a formal device often adopted by natural language semanticists investigating these phenomena. The goal of the meeting is to bring together semanticists that work at specifying the nature of LF covert variables and philosophers of language and logicians engaged by the foundational and methodological issues raised by positing these variables.

The Milan meeting is sponsored by SIFA (Società Italiana di Filosofia Analitica-Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy)
Last modified on Fri, May 21, 2004