Fall 2010 seminar with Jim Pryor (NYU philosophy):
What Philosophers and Linguists Can Learn From Theoretical Computer Science But Didn't Know To Ask


Chris Barker  
Professor 
Department of Linguistics 
 New York University
Department of Linguistics
10 Washington Place, room 604 (6th floor)
New York, NY 10003

Office phone: 212/992-8760 
Email:
  
Research Interests: My central interest is formal model-theoretic analysis for natural language semantics. I'm particularly interested in the internal structure of noun phrases, including possessive constructions, relational nouns, nominal argument structure, implicit arguments, plurals, and thematic relations. Other research topics include quantification, vagueness, crossover, and continuations.  Areas of Instruction: Undergraduate courses taught: Semantics, Syntax, Computational Linguistics, Cryptography. Graduate: Topics in Semantics, Introductory Syntax, Pragmatics, Formal Methods, Formal Semantics.  
Research and Papers; CV   Courses

Some recent projects:

Free choice permission as resource sensitive reasoning.
September 2010. Semantics and Pragmatics 3(10) 1--38. 		From You may eat an apple or a pear, infer You may eat an apple, You may eat a pear, but not You may eat an apple and a pear. I argue that permission, unlike, say, truth, is a scarce resource, and that the semantics must keep track of the amount of permission. This paper includes a complete introduction to Linear Logic suitable for linguists.


TAG+10: The 10th International Conference on Tree Adjoining Grammars and Related Formalisms Cosubstitution, Derivational Locality and Quantifier Scope If we recognize a new tree-combining operation to TAG called cosubstitution (dual to substitution), we can account for the syntax and semantics of quantifier scope without changing either the weak or the strong generative capacity of TAG.

Invited PoPL talk: Wild Control operators



With Chung-chieh Shan: Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding.


Preprint: Possessives and relational nouns An article for Maienborn, von Heusinger and Portner (eds). Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning.
Preprint: Clarity and the grammar of skepticism Mind and Language 24.3: 253--273.
Preprint: Parasitic Scope In Linguistics and Philosophy 30.4: 407--444.


Along with Peter Lasersohn, I'm the co-founder and co-maintainer of the Semantics Archive: An online preprint archive for natural language semantics
Lambda tutorial
Iota and Jot: the simplest non-trivial languages possible?
How many syllables in English?
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. --Charles Darwin
...and Dirac had a weird version of quantum theory in which every state had probability either plus two or minus two. Probability, as common sense defines it, is a number between zero and one expressing our degree of confidence that an event will happen. Probability one means that the event always happens; probability zero means that it never happens. In Dirac's Alice-in-Wonderland world, every state happens either more often than always or less often than never. --Freeman Dyson, in the New York Review of Books.

"In mathematics you don't understand things, you just get used to them."
--von Neumann [as reported by G. Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters]

If it's worth doing, it's worth doing slowly...