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Counterfactuals, dispositions, and conscious experience : essays on entropy
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001)
Chapter 1 of this thesis concerns counterfactual conditionals. David Lewis has offered a natural and influential analysis of counterfactuals. But the analysis fails to take into account the asymmetry of entropy, and comes ...
Perceptual experience : relations and representations/
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009)
The aim of this dissertation is to elaborate and assess the Relational View of perceptual experience, and to compare it to its main rival, the Representational View. Roughly stated, the core claim of the Relational View ...
A theory of individual-level predicates based on blind mandatory implicatures : constraint promotion for optimality theory
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009)
Part I of this dissertation proposes an implicature-based theory of individual-level predicates. The idea is that we cannot say '#John is sometimes tall' because the sentence triggers the scalar implicature that the ...
Topics in the stress and syntax of words
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003)
This dissertation is a study of word structure showing that words exhibit the syntactic phenomenon of phase-by-phase Spell-Out, Chomsky (2001), Marantz (2001). The analysis of data from English and Slovenian indicates that ...
Nominalizations and aspect
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007)
Languages that have aspectually-conditioned ergativity splits generally oppose a "perfect" tense (often called perfective or aorist), with ergative-absolutive case pattern, to an imperfective where case marking follows the ...
Modality and inquiry
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008)
The possibilities we consider or eliminate in inquiry are epistemic possibilities. This dissertation is mainly about what it is to say or believe that something is possible in this sense. Chapter 1 ('Epistemic Contradictions') ...
Modularity and locality in interpretation
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008)
This thesis will argue for four broad claims: (1) That local contexts are needed for a descriptively adequate theory of linguistic interpretation, (2) That presupposition accommodation is made with respect to a set of ...
Probability, explanation, and reasoning
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2000)
Three topics are discussed concerning the application probability and explanation to the confirmation of theories. The first concerns the debate over prediction versus accommodation. I argue that we typically have reason ...
Datives at large
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003)
This dissertation is a study of the syntactic and semantic properties of dative arguments. The main source of data is Spanish, where dative arguments can appear with all types of verbs, and can have a wide range of meanings: ...
Plural predication
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001)
My thesis consists of three self-contained but interconnected papers. In the first one, 'Word and Objects', I assume that it is possible to quantify over absolutely everything, and show that certain English sentences ...