Professor Paul Elbourne

Background

I read Greats and took an MPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology at Oxford before doing my PhD at MIT. There I followed the interdisciplinary PhD programme in semantics, which involves training in linguistics and philosophy. Before coming to Magdalen, I taught at Marlboro College, New York University, and Queen Mary, University of London.

Teaching

I give undergraduate tutorials and classes in General Philosophy, Moral Philosophy (Mill), Ethics, Practical Ethics, Knowledge and Reality, Wittgenstein, and the Philosophy of Logic and Language. At the graduate level, I teach formal semantics and the philosophy of language.

Research Interests

My main research interests lie in natural language semantics and the philosophy of language. I also have interests in ethics.

Selected Publications

• 2026. Adjectives without syntactic categories. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 44(17): 1–45.
• 2024. A program for eliminating syntactic categories. Linguistic Inquiry, Online Early. [Penultimate draft]
• 2022. Weather predicates, binding, and radical contextualism. Mind & Language 37(1): 56–72.
• 2021a. Evidence for generalized quantifier semantics in the interpretation of the English neuter singular pronoun. Natural Language Semantics. 29(4): 579–600.
• 2021b. Presupposition, assertion, and definite descriptions. Linguistics and Philosophy 44(6): 1215–1253.
• 2020. Literal vs enriched meaning: It’s raining. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Semantics, edited by Daniel Gutzmann, Lisa Matthewson, Cécile Meier, Hotze Rullmann, and Thomas Ede Zimmermann. Wiley.
• 2019. Vagueness, contextualism, and ellipsis. Semantics and Pragmatics 12(22): 1–16.
• 2018. Definite descriptions and negative existential quantifiers. Philosophical Studies 175(7): 1597–1612.
• 2016a. Incomplete descriptions and indistinguishable participants. Natural Language Semantics 24(1): 1–43.
• 2016b. Multi-sentential category mistakes. Inquiry 59(5): 542–558.
• 2013. Definite Descriptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 2011. Meaning: A Slim Guide to Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 2010a. The existence entailments of definite descriptions. Linguistics and Philosophy 33(1): 1–10.
• 2010b. On bishop sentences. Natural Language Semantics 18(1): 65–78.
• 2010c. Why propositions might be sets of truth-supporting circumstances. Journal of Philosophical Logic 39(1): 101–111.
• 2008a. The argument from binding. Philosophical Perspectives 22: 89–110.
• 2008b. Demonstratives as individual concepts. Linguistics and Philosophy 31(4): 409–466.
• 2005. Situations and Individuals. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• 2001. E-type anaphora as NP-deletion. Natural Language Semantics 9(3): 241–288.