This will be a three hour per week hybrid course on natural language ontology

Time: Thursdays 14h-17h, sometimes Fridays 9h-12h

Start: September 17, 2026

Room: B122 Bâtiment Egger, Campus Schuman

Program

Sessions:

September 17, 2026: in person only

September 17:

Introduction; Ontology, Semantics, and Syntax

handout

• What is ontology, what is metaphysics?
• How does ontology relate to natural language?
• The ways of involvement of objects in the semantics of natural language: referential NPs, anaphora, implicit arguments, parameters of evaluation
• The importance of ontology for syntax and vice versa
• What sorts of linguistic data display the ontology implicit in natural language? A first look at the core-periphery distinction

Essential reading (further reading recommendations on the handout):

F. Moltmnn, 2022: “Natural Language Ontology,“ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Additional (optional) zoom meetings in September and October TBA soon

 

September 24: no class

October 1: no class

October 15: no class

October 22:

Reference and predication

• Referential and other NPs
• The argument structure of predicates
• Predicates and properties
• The Fregean criterion of objecthood
• Potential problems for the view that referential NPs stand for objects

October 23:

Quantification

• Quantification in logic and in natural language
• Quantification and ontological commitment
• Adverbial quantification
• ‘Non-nominal’ or special quantification

November 5:

Implicit arguments

• Event semantics and its alternatives
• Other implicit arguments in the semantic literature
• Implicit arguments and light silent nouns
• Syntactic constraints on implicit arguments
• Implicit and explicit arguments: distinction in ontological commitment?

November 6:

Tense and Modality

• Some basics of modal logic and modality in natural language
• Some basics of the semantics of tense
• Ontological commitment to possible worlds or situations: extending the range of criteria
• Ontological commitment to times

October 29: semester break, no class

November 12:

Nonexistent objects

• Contexts of apparent referential NPs not standing for actual objects
• Existence predicates and intentional verbs
• Meinongianism and other approaches to apparent non-referring ‘referential’ NPs
• Restrictions on the availability of non-existent objects in the semantics

November 14:

Syntactic categories and ontology

• Ontological and grammatical categories
• Older view about the correlations of ontological and syntactic categories
• Crosslinguistic challenges
• Challenges from recent syntactic theories

November 20:

Parts and Wholes in Semantics 1

• Extensional mereology
• Plural reference

November 27

Parts and Wholes in Semantics 2

• Non-extensional mereology
• Abstract wholes

December 3:

Chomsky’s Challenges to Referentialist Semantics

• Phenomena of apparently incompatible copredication
• Semantic and ontological approaches to problems of co-predication
• What sorts of semantic values can and cannot be ‘real things’? 
• Conceptions of reality in philosophy
• The individuation of artifacts and related things

December 10:

The Ontological Core-Periphery Distinction

• The motivations for the core-periphery distinction
• How should the distinction bet characterized content-wise?
• How is the distinction linguistically grounded?
• How does the distinction relate to Chomsky’s core-periphery distinction?