imagePaul M. Pietroski
pietro@umd.edu

Dept. of Philosophy (Skinner Building)
Dept. of Linguistics (Marie Mount Hall)
College Park, MD 20742
phone:  301-405-5718
fax:  301-405-5690

CV

I teach at the University of Maryland in the departments of linguistics and philosophy. My primary research interests lie at the intersection of these fields.

For the 2007-2008 academic year, I was on leave as the MBB (Mind/Brain/Behavior) Fellow at Harvard University and (in the spring term) visiting professor in the Harvard Philosophy department. One especially nice perq of the "job" was a conversation with critical friends arranged by the good people at MBB.

I've been thinking, for a while now, about how grammatical structure is related to linguistic meaning. Events and Semantic Architecture (OUP 2005, pbk 2006) was a progress report. In various papers, often collaborative, I have also been defending a nativist approach to the study of human language and an internalist conception of meaning. A monograph on this last topic (Semantics without Truth Values) is, hopefully, nearing completion. Newer projects and collaborations have me thinking about numerosity, concepts, lexicalization, and the basic operations employed by the human language faculty.

In an ideal universe, I would reflect on such matters--in moderation, and only before sunset--here, leaving ample time for other things. In the actual world, it's hard not to get depressed about this and that.