• . 2004.
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    The phenomenon of systematic polysemy offers a fruitful domain for examining the theoretical differences between lexicological and lexicographic approaches to description. We consider here the process that provides for systematic conversion of count to mass nouns in English (a chicken Æ chicken, an oak Æ oak etc.). From the point of view of lexicology, we argue, standard syntactic and pragmatic tests suggest the phenomenon should be described by means of a single unindividuated transfer function…Read more
  •  43
    The Pragmatics of Deferred Interpretation
    In , . pp. 344--364. 2004.
    Traditional approaches tend to regard figuration (and by extension, deference in general) as an essentially marked or playful use of language, which is associated with a pronounced stylistic effect. For linguistic purposes, however, there is no reason for assigning a special place to deferred uses that are stylistically notable — the sorts of usages that people sometimes qualify with a phrase like "figuratively speaking." There is no important linguistic difference between using redcoat to refer…Read more
  •  282
    Indexicality and deixis
    Linguistics and Philosophy 16 (1): 1--43. 1993.
    Words like you, here, and tomorrow are different from other expressions in two ways. First, and by definition, they have different kinds of meanings, which are context-dependent in ways that the meanings of names and descriptions are not. Second, their meanings play a different kind of role in the interpretations of the utterances that contain them. For example, the meaning of you can be paraphrased by a description like "the addressee of the utterance." But an utterance of (1) doesn't say the s…Read more
  • Indexical descriptions and descriptive indexicals
    In Marga Reimer & Anne Bezuidenhout (eds.), Descriptions and Beyond, Oxford University Press. 2004.
  •  84
    Do you know what it means to miss new orleans?
    Linguistics and Philosophy 25 (5-6): 671-680. 2002.
    1. I have fond memories of the Linguistic Society of America meeting in New Orleans just after Christmas in 1988, the last time I was able to see all my humanist friends from graduate school who were attending the concurrent meeting of the MLA. Shortly after that, the LSA decided to forego the company of humanists and assemble by itself during the first week of January. It's hard to fault the decision. Over and above the obvious practical advantages, like not having to wait in line for forty-fiv…Read more
  •  35
    Descriptive Indexicals and Indexical Descriptions
    In Anne Bezuidenhout & Marga Reimer (eds.), Descriptions and Beyond, Oxford University Press. pp. 261--279. 2004.
  •  165
    The non-uniqueness of semantic solutions: Polysemy (review)
    Linguistics and Philosophy 3 (2). 1979.
  •  3607
    The Social Life of Slurs
    In Daniel Fogal, Daniel W. Harris & Matt Moss (eds.), New Work on Speech Acts, Oxford University Press. 2018.
    The words we call slurs are just plain vanilla descriptions like ‘cowboy’ and ‘coat hanger’. They don't semantically convey any disparagement of their referents, whether as content, conventional implicature, presupposition, “coloring” or mode of presentation. What distinguishes 'kraut' and 'German' is metadata rather than meaning: the former is the conventional description for Germans among Germanophobes when they are speaking in that capacity, in the same way 'mad' is the conventional expressio…Read more
  •  408
    Idioms
    with Ivan A. Sag and Thomas Wasow
    In Stephen Everson (ed.), Language, Cambridge University Press. pp. 491--538. 1994.
  •  32
    As Donnellan (1966) and many others have pointed out, a sentence like (1) has two readings: 1. The person who's parked in front of the restaurant is in a hurry. On the attributive reading, the description the person who's parked in front of the restaurant is interpreted as a quantifier: it says that the unique person who's parked in front of the restaurant is in a hurry, with no implication that the speaker has a particular person in mind — maybe she simply inferred his haste from his choice of …Read more