Tuesday, August 6 | 19:00

Kai von Fintel
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
The only connectives
(Joint work with Sabine Iatridou, MIT)
We explore an understudied phenomenon, attested in many languages: the use of exclusives and
(1) He is a very nice man, only he talks too much.
(2) I would have helped you, except I had a meeting at work.
We evaluate importing results from the study of adversative coordinators such as English but, French
(3) Heather only had one shot on goal.
(4) Every student passed the test except Gordon.
Among other things, we discuss what happens to the focus-sensitivity
Finally, we turn to cases where these coordinators apply to non-declarative illocutionary forces:
(5) I’m happy to go to Oleana’s for dinner, only where is it?
(6) I hope you enjoy your weekend, except please fix the drain!
Thursday, August 8 | 19:00

Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh
University College London, UK
Unifying Mathematics for Grammar and Data
Tuesday, August 13 | 19:00

The Richard T. Oehrle Memorial Lecture
Cleo Condoravdi
Stanford University, USA
Imperative Strength
Recent work on the semantics of different sentence types places the
notion of commitment center stage: different sentence types give rise
to a commitment by virtue of their conventionally determined force. In
this talk I will present an analysis of imperatives as creating
preferential commitments, focusing on a certain tension between
properties that require a strong semantics and uses that are
problematic for a strong semantics. On this analysis, the perceived
interpretations of imperatives do not reflect their meaning directly,
rather they arise from inferences about why the speaker would incur
the commitment. I will discuss how this view explains the
communicative equivalence of imperatives with necessity modals in some
uses, and is also consistent with weak uses of imperatives, like
`acquiescence’ and `indifference’ imperatives.
Thursday, August 15 | 19:00

Andris Ambainis
University of Latvia, Latvia
What can we do with a quantum computer?
In the last years, we have seen