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Introducing Theory and Evidence in Semantics Erhard Hinrichs John Nerbonne May 26, 2008 CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE AND INFORMATION 1 Introducing Theory and Evidence in Semantics 1 The Occasion This is a collection of papers from a one-day symposium, Theory and Evidence in Semantics, held on June 1, 2006 at the University of Gronin- gen. The conference covered a good deal of ground semantically, and the present collection of papers reflects that range well, including papers on the syntax-semantics and morphology-semantics interfaces, compu- tational forays experimenting with quantitative and application-driven approaches, and descriptive papers on problematic phenomena, includ- ing coordination, negative and collective predicates. The broad range of topics addressed in this book will seem only ap- propriate if one recalls that the one-day symposium was held in honor of David Dowty, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Dowty has been a far-ranging scholar in the field of linguistic semantics, and one of the most significant contributors to this field and to theoretical syn- tax. His well-received 1972 Texas dissertation on the temporal seman- tics of verbs (Dowty, 1972), supervised by Robert Wall and Emmon Bach, made some use of formal logic, but the succeeding years saw him whole-heartedly adopt the framework of logic and model-theory for his work in semantics, quickly making his mark in explorations of tem- poral reference and verbal aspect, culminating in the 1979 book Word Meaning and Montague Grammar (WMMG; Dowty 1979). Characteris- tically, the book was empirically ambitious, uniting analyses of inherent verbal aspect, the paradigms of tense and aspect variation, and