Course Syllabus

About the course

Course Schedule

The schedule below is rough and provisional. Readings, topics, and timing are subject to evolution; but we hope to approximate something like the below.

• January 19: Zoom only. Intro
  • Goals, themes, expectations, class dynamics

Many of the readings are available here

Unit 1: Thematic Introductions

• January 26 Zoom only. Conversations as updates in possibilities
  • Readings: Stalnaker 1978 Assertion
  • D. Lewis 1979 Scorekeeping
  • Stalnaker 2014 Chapter 1 of Context
• February 2. Flatness
  • Egan and Sundell manifesto: All update is goat update
  • Perry 1998 Cognitive significance and new theories of reference
  • Background: Grice: ‘Meaning’
• February 9. Non-informational states
  • Gibbard 1990 Wise choices, apt feelings, chapters 1 and 5
  • Roberts 1998/2012: "Information Structure in Discourse," section 1
  • Background/extra
    • Potts 2006 The expressive dimension
    • Schroeder 2008: "Expression for Expressivists"
    • Camp 2017: "Meta-Expressivism"
    • The rest of Gibbard 1990
    • The rest of Roberts; Afterward
• February 16. Sentence meanings: psychology and convention
  
  • Davidson 1986: "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs"
  • Camp 2018: "Insinuation, common ground, and the conversational record"
  • Background:
    • Grice: "Logic and Conversation"
      
  • Optional:
    • Harris 2020: "Semantics without Semantic Content"
      
    • Camp 2006: “Contextualism, Metaphor, and What is Said”
• February 23. Compositionality
  • K. Lewis 2014: Do we need dynamic semantics?
  • Thomason, Stone, and DeVault 2006 Enlighted update: Informative presupposition in a computational architecture for pragmatic reasoning
  • Background/optional:
    • Heim 1983 On the projection problem for presuppositions
    • Roberts 2021: Imperatives in a dynamic pragmatics
    • Mandelkern 2022: Witnesses

Unit 2: Thematic Implementations

• March 2. Diagonalization-adjacency for declaratives: quantification over coordinates
  • Barker 2002 The dynamics of vagueness [read only the first 10 pages]
  • Plunkett and Sundell 2013 Disagreement and the semantics of normative and evaluative terms
• March 9. Diagonalization-adjacency for non-declaratives
  
  • D. Lewis: “Languages and Language” 
  • Yalcin 2012 Bayesian expressivism
  • Optional: Yalcin 2011 Nonfactualism about epistemic modality

March 16: SPRING BREAK

• March 23. Commitment, Performance and Mood (incl. Insinuation)
  
  • Austin: Performative Utterances
  • Davidson: “Moods and Performances” 
  • Optional:
  • Roberts: "Speech Acts in Discourse Context"
  • Brandom: "Asserting"
  • Starr: “Mood, Force, and Truth”
  • Siegel: "Biscuit Conditionals: Quantification over Potential Literal Acts"
    
    
• March 30. Non-negotiable updates?
  
  • Murray 2014 Varieties of update
  • Anderbois et al: "At-issue Proposals and Appositive Impositions in Discourse"
• April 6. Ways of proceeding: retraction, undoing (and non-undoing)
  • Langton 2018 Blocking as counter-speech
  • MacFarlane 2014 Assessment Sensitivity [chapter 5 is the central thing, chapter 3 also highly relevant]
  • Optional: Maitra 2009 Silencing Speech
• April 13.  Social dynamics with/in language
  • McGowan Conversational Exercitives: Something Else We do with Our Words
  • McCready and Asher: "Discourse-level Politeness and Implicature"
  • Optional: Asher and McCeady 2015 Slides for their ESSLLI course on Cooperative and non-cooperative discourse
• April 20. Information at the margins of language
  • Burnett 2017 Signalling Games, Sociolinguistic Variation and the Construction of Style
  • Optional:
    • Eckert, Penelope. 2012. Three Waves of Variation Study: The Emergence of Meaning in the Study of Sociolinguistic Variation
    • Shannon, Claude. 1948. A mathematical theory of information
    • Lassiter, Daniel and Noah Goodman. 2017. Adjectival Vagueness in a Bayesian model of interpretation
    • Dennet, Daniel. 1981. True Believers: The intentional strategy and why it works
    • McConnell-Ginet: "'What’s In a Name?' Social Labeling and Gender Practices"
• April 27. Discursive injustice
  • Kukla 2014: Performative Force, Convention and Discursive Injustice
  • Fricker 2007: Epistemic Injustice
    • Chapter 1: "Testimonial Injustice,"
    • Chapter 7: "Hermeneutical Injustice"
  • Optional: The rest of Fricker 2007
• May 4. Presentations and discussion of course projects