Peter Nathan Lasersohn

• Ph.D.
• Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

I argue that common nouns should be analyzed as variables, rather than as predicates which take variables as arguments. This necessitates several unusual features to the analysis, such as allowing variables to be modally non-rigid, and assigning their values compositionally. However, treating common nouns as variables offers a variety of theoretica...

This book explores linguistic and philosophical issues presented by sentences expressing personal taste, such as Roller coasters are fun, or Licorice is tasty. Standard semantic theories explain the meanings of sentences by specifying the conditions under which they are true; here, Peter Lasersohn asks how we can account for sentences that are conc...

Popular assumptions about distributive predicates and implicit arguments interact to predict incorrect truth conditions for sentences in which a predi­cate takes both an implicit argument and an overt distributive argument. This paper argues that the conflict provides evidence for a particular approach to argument structure and in particular to the...

I argue that sentence contents should be assigned truth-values relative to parameters other than a possible world only if those parameters are fixed by the context of assessment rather than the context of use. Standard counterexamples, including tense, de se attitudes, and knowledge ascriptions, all admit of alternative analyses which do not make u...

I argue that compositionality (in the sense of homomorphic interpretation) is compatible with radical and pervasive contextual effects on interpretation. Apparent problems with this claim lose their force if we are careful in distinguishing the question of how a grammar assigns interpretations from the question of how people figure out which interp...

Mass and plural expressions exhibit interesting similarities in distribution and interpretation, including cumulative reference, the ability to appear bare, and a parallel alternation between existential and generic readings. They also exhibit important differences in agreement, determiner choice, and in the types of quantification available. Major...

Recent arguments for relativist semantic theories have centered on the phenomenon of “faultless disagreement.” This paper offers independent motivation for such theories, based on the interpretation of predicates of personal taste in certain attitude contexts and presuppositional constructions. It is argued that the correct interpretation falls out...

I compare Potts' use of a 'judge" parameter in semantic interpretation with the use of a similar parameter in Lasersohn (2005). The latter technique portrays the content of expressives as constant across speakers, while Pott's technique does not. The idea that the content of expressives is a kind of presupposition is also briefly defended, and a te...

Semantic theories employing quantification of hidden variables ranging over events have been applied to a wide variety of linguistic problems, including the semantics of adverbial adjuncts, perception reports, thematic relations, nominalization, and Aktionsart. Event-based semantic theories differ in their representation of argument structure and i...

Peter Lasersohn completed his Ph.D. in linguistics at Ohio State University in 1988. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of California–Santa Cruz, and the University of Rochester; he is currently Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of A semantics for g...

This paper argues that truth values of sentences containing predicates of “personal taste” such as fun or tasty must be relativized to individuals. This relativization is of truth value only, and does not involve a relativization of semantic content: If you say roller coasters are fun, and I say they are not, I am negating the same content which yo...

Recent years have seen a whole series of book-length studies on the formal semantics of plurality and its relation to coordination, quantifier scope, and related phenomena (Landman, 2000; Lasersohn, 1995; Schein, 1993; Schwarzschild, 1996; etc.). Winter's book provides a very interesting and worthwhile addition to this list, and shows that despite...

It is a truism that people speak 'loosely'-that is, that they often say things that we can recognize not to be true, but which come close enough to the truth for practical purposes. Certain expressions, such as those including exactly all and perfectly, appear to serve as signals of the intended degree of approximation to the truth. This article pr...

L'A. examine l'operateur de distributivite propose par Link (1987, 1991) et Roberts (1987, 1987) pour rendre compte des phrases qui presentent une ambiguite entre une interpretation collective et une interpretation distributive, en position sujet dans un premier temps et en position non sujet dans un deuxieme temps. Il suggere ensuite une generalis...

Sentences containing plural or conjoined noun phrases often display an ambiguity between so-called collective and distributive readings. For example, sentence (1) can mean either than John and Mary each bought a house, which is the distributive reading, or that they bought one jointly, which is the collective reading.

This paper argues that a kinds-based analysis of bare plurals is incompatible with an analysis of donkey anaphors as variables. However, kinds are compatible with an E-type analysis.

Preface. Part One: Collective and Distributive Readings: History and Range of Possible Analyses. Introduction: An Apparent Difference between Two Types of Conjunction. 1. Logical Form. 2. The NP/S Analysis. 3. The Relational/S Analysis. 4. The S/S Analysis. 5. Two Types of NP/NP Analysis. 6. Interlude on Collective Action and Colors. 7. Locating th...

The pluractional markers discussed in the last chapter seem to function as something like plurality markers on verbs. Accordingly, we have treated pluractional verbs as applying to groups of events, more-or-less as we treated plural noun phrases as denoting groups of individuals. (Of course in the case of pluractionals there were a number of compli...

The analyses we will consider make different claims regarding the logical forms of sentences like (0.1) and (0.2). But different people understand the term logical form differently, so before we proceed, some clarification is necessary. Often, what people mean by the “logical form” of a sentence is a formula in some artificial logical language, des...

An especially interesting application of the semantics just sketched is in the analysis of a class of morphemes frequently encountered in the descriptive and diachronic literature, but only rarely and incompletely addressed in formal semantics. These morphemes normally take the form of some sort of affix on the verb, frequently reduplicative, most...

One potential objection to the NP/S Analysis, perhaps more likely to be made by philosophers than linguists, is that it requires an ontological conunitment to the existence of groups. For example, (the non-contradictory reading of) John and Mary are a couple is analyzed as involving reference to the “group” of John and Mary. This group is an entity...

We have seen that certain sentences involving coordinate or plural noun phrases take an individual level, or distributive reading: John and Mary are asleep. Other sentences take a collective reading: John and Mary are a happy couple. (Perhaps such sentences have a separate but non-sensical distributive-like reading as well, as in the “official vers...

This chapter concludes Part One of the book, and implements the major conclusions of the preceding chapters in a formal fragment of English. These conclusions form the starting assumptions for Part Two, which expands on them to account for a wider range of semantic phenomena than those considered so far. The fragment is intended to provide a way to...

Let us return now to the question of how to account for the difference in meaning between examples (0.1) and (0.2), repeated here as (2.1) and (2.2): (2.1) John and Mary are asleep. (2.2) John and Mary are a happy couple.

Neither the analysis of Lasersohn (1988, 1990) nor that of Schwarzschild (1992b) seems entirely satisfactory. Ideally, what we would like is an analysis which generalizes to as many of the readings of together as possible, which does not give wrong results for examples involving downward entailing contexts or related problems, which maintains a col...

Despite their differences, the NP/S, Relational/S and S/S Analyses face a number of problems which they share in common These problems arise from the following claim, which is made in all three analyses: If a sentence containing conjoined noun phrases is logically equivalent to a corresponding sentence containing conjoined clauses, then the origina...

We begin by considering the adverb together, attending first to its collectivizing use, as in John and Mary built a table together.

So far, we have said very little about what a “group” of objects is. And, to a large extent, it hardly matters exactly what groups are like; we have come a long way making just minimal assumptions. Specifically, our assumptions so far (stated in Section 7.1) are just that a model for the interpretation of English must contain a set I of individuals...

A perennial issue that arises with regard to sentences showing a collective/distributive ambiguity is that of how many readings they have. The answers that have been given range from one (effectively denying that the collective/distributive distinction comes from an authentic ambiguity at all) to arbitrarily many, allowing even for transfinite numb...

Fortunately, the Relational/S Analysis is not the only altemative to the NP/S Analysis. Another option is the analysis I will call the S/S Analysis. Unfortunately, the S/S Analysis runs into some of the same problems as the Relational/S Analysis, plus some of its own.

Up to now, our discussion has focussed mainly on two core sorts of examples: those, like John and Maly are asleep, which seem clearly to be equivalent in truth conditions to corresponding sentences involving clausal conjunction; and those, like John and Mary are a happy couple, which just as clearly do not (the S/S Analysis notwithstanding). Of cou...

When a definite noun phrase fails to refer, the statement containing it is often felt to lack a truth value, as in The king of France is bald. In other examples, however, the statement seems intuitively false, and not truth-valueless: consider the case of a speaker who points at an obviously empty chair and says The king of France is sitting in tha...

f. g. h. i. j. and Mary lifted the piano together. and Mary together earned more than $7000. and Mary sat together. and Mary are together. and Mary stood up together. John lifted the piano and the tuba together. John put the bicycle together. John and Mary are happy together. John and Mary are sleeping together. John and Mary are in this together....

It is argued that the verb sound is ambiguous between one reading where it denotes a two-place relation between individuals and properties, and a second reading where it serves as a one-place predicate of propositions. A corresponding ambiguity is claimed for the adjective like, between one reading roughly paraphrased as "similar to," and a second...

1. Introduction. The question we were asked to consider for this workshop is whether contextualism — understood as the claim that context-sensitivity goes beyond indexicality and affects every natural language sentence — is incompatible with compositionality, and threatens the project of building a systematic semantics for natural language.

published or submitted for publication is peer reviewed

Revision of the author's thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1988. Includes bibliographical references (p. 135-140).