Week of April 22, 2013

Radcliffe Presentation Series: Angelika Kratzer

Angelika Kratzer (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University; University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study 2012-2013 Fellows Presentation Series: Mapping Possibilities
Monday, April 22 | 4pm | Sheerr Room, Fay House (10 Garden Street, Cambridge MA)

Angelika Kratzer’s area of specialization is semantics, an interdisciplinary field located at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive psychology, logic, and philosophy. Her research concerns how natural languages are constructed so as to make it possible for humans to assemble complex meanings systematically from small and simple pieces. Humans talk about mere possibilities: what might have been, could be, or should be. Our notions of what is possible, inevitable, likely, or desirable are fundamentally the same and highly systematic, and this is why they have attracted the attention of mathematicians, logicians, and philosophers for more than 2,000 years. The talk will illustrate how the distinctively human faculty of language interacts with other knowledge resources to help us manipulate and keep track of possibilities – sometimes for serious, sometimes just for fun.

MIT Colloquium 

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Mark Baker (Rutgers University)
Friday, April 26 | 3:30-5pm | 32-141