I was at SALT 14 this past weekend, at Northwestern. Like almost everyone who planned to arrive on Thursday evening, I was delayed for many hours by inclement weather in Chicago and environs. This gave me plenty of time to wonder how Chicago, where the weather is nearly always bad for flying, ended up as a major hub for so many airlines.

I arrived late on Thursday, but not as late as some. Barbara Partee and Volodja Borschev didn't get to their hotel until after 1:00 am.

Once the conference got underway on Friday morning, there was plenty of stimulation, in the form of coffee and excellent talks. Kai von Fintel agrees: "a very good conference with lots of interesting presentations and convivial collegiality". This success was due in no small part to Chris Kennedy, Stefan Kaufmann, and the team of graduate students at Northwestern.

At the business meeting, it was decided that UCLA will host SALT next year (SALT 15). Chris Tancredi made a successful bid to host SALT 16 in Japan in 2006. Chris is going to try to score funding for all the speakers, so that SALT 16 is not beyond the budgetary constraints of most linguists. The thinking behind the move to Japan is that it might help to establish a stronger semantics community in Japan, perhaps giving rise to an Asian SALT. If Chris manages to find enough support, UMass will host SALT in 2007 (SALT 17). We are back-up for 2006, in case Chris's funding ideas don't pan out.

And now some brief summaries of the talks. (The abstracts are linked from here, and it is worth watching semantics etc. to see if more handout locations appear there.)

Barbara Abbott (Michigan) began the conference with 'Some remarks on indicative conditionals'. This was in part an attempt to reestablish material implication as a useful basis for a theory of natural language conditionals.

Maribel Romero (UPenn) delivered 'Tense and intensionality in specificational copular clauses'. This is the newest installment in Maribel's series of papers exploring the intensionality of copular verbs and their arguments. It must have been pretty soon after this terrific presentation that Maribel learned that she had been awarded tenure. Everyone shared in the extra good will that this engendered, and Kai von Fintel raised a toast to her at the party on Saturday night.

Tim Fernando (Trinity College), in 'Inertia in temporal modification', used regular languages, syntacticized as DRT-style box formula, to model generalizations about aspect of the sort that David Dowty first explored from a Montagovian perspective.

Kai von Fintel (MIT), delivering joint work with Sabine Iatridou (MIT), stumped everyone, it seems, with the construction represented by If you want to hear good semantics papers, you need only go to SALT. Kai and Sabine have made a great deal of progress in understanding this construction's central properties in compositional terms. Puzzles remained even after the question period, though, which says quite a lot about how challenging this topic is. The handout for 'Anatomy of a modal' is downloadable from semantics etc., specifically from this post, which also links to a more cross-linguistically rich version.

Rani Nelken and Ken Shan (Harvard) talked about how to use modal logic, on a slightly new interpretation, to develop a theory of natural language questions. 'A logic of interrogation should be internalized in a modal logic for knowledge' showed how to push the limits of an extensional system, related highly articulated versions of such systems to the usual sort of intensional models in semantics, and sketched a method for extending their treatment into the dynamic realm. Rani has some related papers posted here.

In 'The presuppositions of still', Michela Ippolito (UCSC) developed an analysis of still that reveals the commonality among its various uses and in turn highlights some connections between degree modification and temporal intensionality.

Paul Portner (Georgetown) finished up the first day of the conference with 'The semantics of imperatives within a theory of clause types', which is part of his NSF project with Raffaella Zanuttini about clause typing cross-linguistically. Paul's website has a useful section devoted to this project.

Mark Steedman (Edinburgh) opened Saturday's proceedings with 'Scope alternation and the syntax-semantics interface'. Mark's view of scope taking is refreshing and (thus) probably controversial at every turn. A great many words that you might have thought denoted quantificational determiners (e.g., some, most) are analyzed by Mark in nonquantificational terms, using Skolem functions. The Skolem functions arrive with certain definitions about suitable environments for them. These do much of the work normally handled by quantifier raising or Cooper storage. It might be fruitful to compare this approach to the choice-function analysis of indefinites.

In 'Contextual restriction and the arguments of quantificational determiners', Anastasia Giannakidou (Chicago) challenged Lisa Matthewson's (2001) claim that quantifier restrictions are entity-level, arguing instead that the properties of an e-type semantics in this area are the result of overt domain restriction. This in turn leads to desirable modifications elsewhere in the theory of quantificational restrictions cross-linguistically.

Pranav Anand and Andrew Nevins (MIT) delivered 'Shifty operators in changing contexts: Indexicals in Zazaki and Slave'. Pranav gave an earlier version of this talk at SNEWS here in Amherst last fall. I was impressed by the many ways that he and Andrew had increased their factual basis and deepened their theoretical approach to the phenomenon since then. They have deemphasized the issue of Kaplanian monsters, which usually surrounds these discussions. The result is a clearer picture of the factual situation and in turn a deeper sense for the importance of their theoretical moves.

Last fall, Yael Sharvit (UConn) visited my proseminar to talk about free indirect discourse. At SALT, she gave a modified version of that talk, 'Free indirect discourse and de re pronouns', in which she defined and justified a free indirect discourse operator. I strongly suspect that there are deep connections between this phenomenon and the shifty indexicals of Pranav Anand and Andrew Nevins' talk, and it would be easy to cut a conceptual path to Paul Portner's work on speech acts as well.

Pauline Jacobson (Brown) continued her every-other-year-to-SALT routine with 'Kennedy's puzzle: What I'm named or who I am?', which provided additional indication of just how hard it would be to establish a central role for variable names in natural language analysis.

Chris Barker (UCSD) achieved lots of things in 'Parasitic scope'. The main line of the argument involved developing a compositional analysis of same and different as quantificational adjectives. Along the way, Chris established deep connections between the LF-based theory of interpretation developed in the Heim and Kratzer textbook and his own theory of the role of continuations in natural language. The move was pedagogically effective, and it revealed important correspondences between the two approaches.

Marcelo Ferreira (MIT) delivered 'Imperfectives and plurality'. I believe that this work is relevant to the work of many here in South College, particularly Paula Menendez-Benito and Luis Alonso-Ovalle. I hope Marcelo posts his handout on the Net so that I don't have to make photocopies of it constantly. Marcelo delivered a version of this talk at SNEWS this past fall. It was great to see how much the work had developed since then.

In 'V-sugiru ('V too much') in Japanese as a comparative quantifier', Kimiko Nakanishi (UPenn) used V-sugiru to extend the theory of comparatives into new areas.

I opened Sunday morning's proceedings with a paper I coauthored with Shigeto Kawahara (UMass), 'The performative nature of Japanese honorifics'. I received many questions and comments that will have a significant impact on how we develop the work from here. It would have been nice to have Shigeto with me to deliver certain parts of the talk and to answer subtle questions about the Japanese data.

After my talk, Eric McCready took the stage to offer a different perspective on some similarly expressive adverbials in Japanese. His paper 'Two Japanese adverbials and expressive content' shows the influence of Nick Asher and his brand of DRT, and it addresses a largely overlooked aspect of Japanese syntax and semantics.

'The semantic contribution of wh-words and the ranking of type-shifts: Evidence from free relatives crosslinguistically', by Ivano Caponigro (UMD), wins the prizes for longest title and most cross-linguistically rich factual basis. The extended version of his handout (available in PDF here) offers data from 29 languages. Not since the recent books by Jason Merchant and Norvin Richards have we seen such a broad array of data marshalled in support of a proposal about Wh clauses.

Barbara Partee and Vladimir Borschev closed the conference with 'The semantics of Russian genitive of negation: The nature and role of perspectival structure'. This talk is part of their longterm goal of synthesizing the work on genitive of negation that has been done in Russia with what has been done in the West. They took promising steps towards a formal account of the complex cluster of known semantic properties of this construction. The spirit of inclusiveness that characterizes this work made it an ideal ending to the weekend.