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Paul
M. Pietroski |
Present Position
- Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy, University of Maryland, since 2003; appointed Associate Proessor in 1998.
Previous Position
- McGill University, Department of Philosophy, 1990 to 1998.
My main research interests in linguistics concern compositional semantics. How is the meaning of a complex expression determined by its structure and constituents? And how much theoretical apparatus is needed to explain the relevant facts? I've been writing a series of papers--and now a book (Events and Semantic Architecture, forthcoming with OUP)--by way of defending the following idea: Davidsonian event analyses, elaborated with appeals to thematic roles, provide the best semantics for a wide range of natural language constructions; and this suggests that at least a lot of semantic composition can be understood in terms of conjoining (perhaps complex) predicates of events, without a lot of type-shifting, given the right syntax. In what turns out to be a related vein, I've also been collaborating with various colleagues in the department on a series of papers concerning innateness, poverty of stimulus arguments, ambiguity, and the syntax underlying causative constructions. There is also the other half of my academic life, in the philosophy department, where I try to occasionally think about action and mental causation.
Books
Events and Semantic Architecture. Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
Causing Actions. Oxford University Press (2000). Click here also for an e-symposium on the book.Most recent Articles
- Function and Concatenation. To appear in Logical Form (Oxford, OUP), edited by G. Preyer.
- The Character of Natural Language Semantics. To appear in Epistemology of Language (Oxford, OUP), edited by A. Barber.
- Events and Causation.To appear in Contemporary Philosophy in Focus: on Davidson (Cambridge, CUP), edited by K. Ludwig.
- Small Verbs, Complex Events: Analyticity without Synonymy. To appear in Chomsky and his Critics (Cambridge, Blackwell), edited by L. Antony and N. Hornstein.
- Does every Sentence Like This Contain a Scope Ambiguity (with Norbert Hornstein)? To appear in Belief in Meaning, edited by W. Hintzen.
- Innate Ideas (with Stephen Crain). To appear in The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (Cambridge, CUP) edited by J. McGilvray.
- Reply to Pullum and Scholz (with Stephen Crain). To appear in The Linguistic Review (2002).
- Innateness and Universal Grammar (with Stephen Crain). Forthcoming in Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science.
- Precis of Causing Actions and Replies to Commentators. In A Field Guide to the Philosophy of Mind. http://www.uniroma3.it/kant/field/pietroskisymp.htm
- Nature, Nurture, and Universal Grammar (with Stephen Crain). Linguistics and Philosophy 24: 139-186 (2001).
- Review of Knowledge of Meaning (by Richard Larson and Gabriel Segal). Mind 109: 960-4 (2000).
- On Explaining That. Journal of Philosophy 97: 665-62 (2000).
- The Undeflated Domain of Semantics. Sats: The Nordic Journal of Philosophy 1: 161-76 (2000).
- Euthyphro and the Semantic: review of Jerry Fodor's Concepts. Mind and Language 15:341-49 (2000).
For an extensive list of all articles, please click here.
Invited Papers and Conference Papers
- Composition by Conjunction. From Signalling to Structured Communcation Conference, Cornell Univ., 2001.
- Causing Actions. University of Maryland (Baltimore County), 2001.
- Actions and Adjuncts (Again). Rutgers University (Center for Cognitive Science), 2000.
- Two Conceptions of Semantics. Stanford University, 2000.
- Why Does the Mental (and the Moral and ...) Supervene on the Physical? Howard University, 2000.
- The Character of Natural Language Semantics. Epistemology of Language Conference, Sheffield 2000.
- Functions and Events. Metropolitan Semantics Group, Rutgers Univ., 2000; Univ. of Maryland, 1999.
- Does every Sentence Like This Exhibit a Scope Ambiguity? Interamerican Philosophy Conference, Puebla (Mexico), 1999.
For an extensive list of all articles, please click here.