About

Barry Schein is a Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Southern California's Dornsife College. His research specialties include semantics and the philosophy of language. He holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has made significant contributions to the understanding of event semantics, plural expressions, and thematic relations in language. His notable publications include the book chapter 'Event Semantics' in the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language and articles on adverbial and descriptive reciprocals. Schein has been recognized with a Fulbright Award and served as a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Linguistics at the University of Trieste. His work focuses on the intersection of linguistic meaning and philosophical inquiry, advancing the understanding of how language encodes and relates to conceptual and semantic structures.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Physics
• Programming language
• Mathematics
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Errant Implicature

  Philosophical Perspectives · 2024-12-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT To measure is to err. Serving both numeric and non‐numeric measurement, the language of measurement refers to margins of error, within which measurement reports locate their measurements. Such reports and reasoning from them invoke what is known and what is known to be known about error‐strewn measurement to derive and contrast the implicatures of bare and comparative measures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Plurals

  Scholarworks (University of Massachusetts Amherst) · 2020-11-10

  articleSenior author
  Publisher

• Negation in Event Semantics

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Mathematics

  Abstract With events as dense as time, negation threatens to be trivial, unless ‘not’ is noughtly, an adverb of quantification. So revised, classical puzzles of negation in natural language are revisited, in which deviation from the logical connective, violating Excluded Middle, appears to prompt a special condition or special meaning. The language of events also contains negative event descriptions—After the flood, it not drying out ruined the basement and one could smell it not drying out—and these appear to founder on the logic of the constructions in which they occur and on reference to suspect negative events, events of not drying out. A language for event semantics with ‘not’ as noughtly resolves the puzzles surveyed—within classical logic, without ambiguity or special conditions on the meaning of ‘not’, and without a metaphysics of negative events.

  PublisherDOI

• Nip and tuck for definite description

  Linguistics and Philosophy · 2018-10-30 · 48 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 'And': Conjunction Reduction Redux

  2017-07-21 · 30 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

• 'And'

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2017-01-01 · 43 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  A bold argument that “and” always means “&,” the truth-functional sentential connective.In this book, Barry Schein argues that “and” is always the sentential logical connective with the same, one, meaning. “And” always means “&,” across the varied constructions in which it is tokened in natural language. Schein examines the constructions that challenge his thesis, and shows that the objections disappear when these constructions are translated into Eventish, a neo-Davidsonian event semantics, and, enlarged with Cinerama Semantics, a vocabulary for spatial orientation and navigation. Besides rescuing “and” from ambiguity, Eventish and Cinerama Semantics solve general puzzles of grammar and meaning unrelated to conjunction, revealing the book's central thesis in the process: aspects of meaning mistakenly attributed to “and” are discovered to reflect neighboring structures previously unseen and unacknowledged.Schein argues that Eventish and Cinerama Semantics offer a fundamental revision to clause structure and what aspects of meaning are represented therein. Eventish is distinguished by four features: supermonadicity, which enlarges verbal decomposition so that every argument relates to its own event; descriptive event anaphora, which replaces simple event variables with silent descriptive pronouns; adverbialization, which interposes adverbials derived from the descriptive content of every DP; and AdrPs, which replace all NPs with Address Phrases that locate what nominals denote within scenes or frames of reference.With 'And,' Schein rehabilitates an old rule of transformational, generative grammar, answering the challenges to it exhaustively and meticulously.

  PublisherDOI

• Noughty bits: the subatomic scope of negation

  Linguistics and Philosophy · 2016-12-01 · 52 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Adverbial, Descriptive Reciprocals

  Proceedings from Semantics and Linguistic Theory · 2015-04-03 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  No abstract.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 8 EVENT SEMANTICS

  2013-05-07

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Davidson’s diamonds are a recurrent pattern of inference in natural language, in which elimination of a modifier phrase or argument, the arrows in (1), is valid; but, introduction reversing the arrows is not (Davidson 1967, 1985; Castañeda 1967; Parsons 1985, 1990):(1) Jones (slowly) buttered the toast with a knife in the kitchen. OP Jones (slowly) buttered the toast with a knife. Jones (slowly) buttered thetoast in the kitchen. PO Jones (slowly) buttered the toast. OP Jones (slowly) buttered. The toast was (slowly) buttered. PO There was a (slow) buttering. (2) e(Agent(e, x1) & slow(e) & butter(e) & Patient(e, x2) &with (e, x3) & in(e, x4))A Davidsonian logical form (2), being a conjunction of terms, explains that elimination of a modifier or argument is elimination of a conjunct. It further represents that all the conjuncts are about a particular e in a sentence which asserts that an e exists to satisfy them all. Introduction is thus shown to be a mistaken inference from the existence of some particulars satisfying given descriptions to the existence of a single one satisfying a conjunction of them:(3) e(Agent(e, j) & butter(e) [an x3: knife(x3)] with(e, x3)) Jones buttered with a knife. e(Agent(e, j) & butter(e) & [the x4: kitchen(x4)] in(e, x4)) Jones buttered in the kitchen. Ӎ e(Agent(e, j) & butter(e) & [an x3: knife(x3)] with(e, x3) &[the x4: kitchen(x4)] in(e, x4)) Jones buttered with a knife in the kitchen.

  PublisherDOI

• Plurals

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2009-09-02 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Extension of the logical language to deliver plural reference and the logical relations that constitute knowledge of the singular and plural acquires empirical bite just in case it conforms with increasing precision to the syntax of the natural language and affords explanation of what speakers know about the distribution and meaning of plural expressions in their language. As for the syntax of natural language, this discussion, being none too precise, is guided throughout by just two considerations and their immediate consequences, which is discussed at greater length in this article. The first, morpheme univocality, is that a morpheme despite its various syntactic and morphological contexts has a single meaning that supports all its occurrences.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alicja Gorecka

  1 shared

• Bernard Tranel

  1 shared

• Bernard Comrie

  1 shared

• Kevin Russell

  University of Manitoba

  1 shared

• Mark S. Seidenberg

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  1 shared

• Maria Polinsky

  1 shared

• Elaine J. Anderson

  University College London

  1 shared

• Joseph Aoun

  1 shared

Education

• PhD Linguistics, Linguistics & Philosophy

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• AB, Linguistics

  Yale College

Awards & honors

• Fulbright Award, Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Linguistic…