Branching Times Metaphysics, Irrealist Semantics + Natural Language Negation

In this talk, i describe the problem of “future contingents” - in effect, how we determine the truth of statements about the future - and outline “branching times” theoretic approaches to this question. in recent work in linguistic semantics, these models have shed light on the notion of “reality status”, a grammatical category that draws a broad distinction between actual and non-actual states of affairs. drawing on novel data from djambarrpuyngu, a language spoken in northern Australia, I implement a branching-times theoretic analysis of their reality status system that draws on insights from theories of natural language negation to account for an asymmetry in the marking of reality status in negative versus positive sentences.

Speaker: Joshua Phillips, Stanford University

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