The Semantics of Plurals, Focus, Degrees, and Times

This volume is a tribute to Roger Schwarzschild's immense contributions in the formal semantics of nouns, focus, degrees and space, and tense and aspect. Collectively, the papers in the volume reveal parallels across ontological domains, in particular in the context of elements with internal structure, like plural sets, alternative sets, degree intervals, temporal intervals, and vectors. This research suggests that the structure of an entity could inform the semantic behavior of that entity just as much (if not more) than its semantic type or lexical category. And because these structures dictate the formation of semantic alternatives, it can help inform focus semantics and scalar implicature as well.   

Old questions on plurals, focus and degree expressions get new answers in this collection of papers in honor of Roger Schwarzchild. Roger Schwarzschild is one of the leading scholars in semantics, and the editors have been highly successful in requesting contributions by his teachers, peers and former students. Some papers have circulated in draft form for many years, and find their final home in this edited volume, which well reflects the state of the art in the field. Prof. dr. Henriëtte de Swart, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

• Theoretical linguistics
• Syntax-Semantics interface
• interface of semantics and pragmatics
• semantics of elements
• ontological domains

• School of Cognitive Science, Hampshire College, Amherst, USA

  Daniel Altshuler

• Department of Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, USA

  Jessica Rett

Daniel Altshuler is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Hampshire College. He received his PhD from Rutgers University in 2010, with his dissertation Temporal interpretation in narrative discourse and event internal reference. His research investigates how compositional semantics interacts with discourse structure and discourse coherence; a topic explored in his recent book Events, States and Times. He has also developed pedagogical texts that promote student centered learning, such as his forthcoming, co-authored textbook A course in semantics.  

Jessica Rett is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at UCLA. She received her PhD from Rutgers University in 2008, with her dissertation Degree modification in natural language. She writes on degree semantics and the semantics/pragmatics interface; both topics are covered in her recent book The semantics of evaluativity. She is Vice-Chair of Graduate Studies at UCLA and a proud co-organizer of the Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics' Pop-Up Mentoring program.  

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