Semantics is a notoriously tricky field within linguistics. Not only is it difficult to state exactly what words mean, but even more fundamentally, it’s hard to know what meanings even are. It is tempting to say that meanings are mental concepts--the ideas that are generated in our minds when we hear words like dogs, swim, happy, or frustration. But what are the mental concepts associated with words like every? some? two? many? hella? We might say that these mental concepts are quantities...but exactly what quantities? How many is many, after all? This talk explores these questions, arguing that in order to answer them, we need a theory of semantics that treats the meaning of a word not as the mental concept it evokes but as the way it points to objects in the world around us.
Kristen Greer received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Davis in 2014. Before that, she completed a B.A. in Spanish and an M.A. in Spanish Linguistics, also at UC Davis. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. Her research focuses on the meaning of quantity-denoting expressions (every, some, many, few, two/three and the like) in context. Her work has been published in the semantics journal Linguistics and Philosophy, and she has spoken at conferences at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, as well as to smaller audiences at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz.
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