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SUMMARY:Music Semantics: Problems and Prospects
DTSTART:20171204T140000
DTEND:20171204T153000
DTSTAMP:20260407T020705Z
UID:a879f10848162f905ddd9fbe9069572d7b96e7056ddeea7d496dcdf7
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Prof. Philippe Schlenker is a senior researcher at CNRS (Insti
 tut Jean-Nicod\, Paris) and a Global Distinguished Professor at New York U
 niversity. He was educated at École Normale Supérieure (Paris)\, and obt
 ained a Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT\, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from EHE
 SS (Paris). He has taught at École Normale Supérieure\, Paris\, at the U
 niversity of Southern California\, at UCLA\, and\, since 2008\, at NYU. P.
  Schlenker’s early interests included semantics\, pragmatics\, the philo
 sophy of language\, and philosophical logic. He has conducted research on 
 indexicals and indirect discourse\, intensional semantics\, anaphora\, pre
 suppositions\, as well as semantic paradoxes.\n \nIn recent work\, he has
  advocated a program of 'super semantics' that seeks to expand the traditi
 onal frontiers of the field. He has investigated the semantics of sign lan
 guages\, with special attention both to their logical structure and to the
  rich iconic means that interact with it. In order to have a point of comp
 arison for these iconic phenomena\, Philippe Schlenker has also investigat
 ed the logic and typology of gestures in spoken language. In collaborative
  work with primatologists and psycholinguists\, he has laid the groundwork
  for a 'primate semantics' that seeks to apply the general methods of form
 al linguistics to primate vocalizations. And in ongoing research\, he has 
 advocated the development of a detailed semantics for music\, albeit one t
 hat is very different from linguistic semantics.\n \nAbstract\nWhile it i
 s nearly uncontroversial that music is subject to some 'syntactic rules'\,
  it is initially very unclear that music has 'meaning' in anything like th
 e usual sense. We sketch a conceptual framework in which music can trigger
  inferences about a music-external reality\, and may even be endowed with 
 (highly underspecified) truth conditions. But their source is very differe
 nt from that of most truth-conditional phenomena in language: normal audit
 ory cognition and aspects of iconic semantics (used for pictures\, gesture
 s\, and some aspects of signs) are better models than compositional semant
 ics in language.
LOCATION:SV 1717 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==SV%201717
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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