Certain measurement-related constructions impose a requirement that the measure function used track the part-whole structure of the domain of measurement, so that a given entity or eventuality must have a larger measurement in the chosen dimension than any of its salient proper parts. I provide evidence from English and Chinese that these constructions can be used to measure the intensity of mental states like hatred and love, indicating that in the natural language ontology of such states, intensity correlates with part-whole (...) structure. A natural language metaphysics of psychological intensity meeting this requirement is then developed and integrated into the semantics. Further complications arise when looking at attitudes like want, wish, and regret, which also permit measurements of intensity in the relevant constructions. To account for such attitudes, the ontology and semantics are then enriched in a way that integrates ordering and quantification over possible worlds into the part-whole structure of attitude states, so that even in these more complicated cases, the constructions at hand have a unified compositional semantics. (shrink)

The point of formalisation is to model various aspects of natural language. Perhaps the main use to which formalisation is put is to model and explain inferential relations between different sentences. Judged solely by this objective, a formalisation is successful in modelling the inferential network of natural language sentences to the extent that it mirrors this network. There is surprisingly little literature on the criteria of good formalisation, and even less on the question of what it is for a formalisation (...) to mirror the inferential network of a natural language or some fragment of it. This paper takes some exploratory steps towards a quantitative account of the main ingredient in the goodness of a formalisation. We introduce and critically examine a mathematical model of how well a formalisation mirrors natural-language inferential relations. (shrink)

This paper has two goals. The first is to formulate an adequate account of the semantics of the progressive aspect in English: the semantics of Agatha is making a cake, as opposed to Agatha makes a cake. This account presupposes a version of the so-called Aristotelian classification of verbs in English into EVENT, PROCESS and STATE verbs. The second goal of this paper is to refine this classification so as to account for the infamous category switch problem, the problem of (...) how it is that modification of a verb like run by an adverbial like to the store can turn a PROCESS phrase (run) into an EVENT phrase (run to the store). Views discussed include those of Aqvist, Bach, Bennett, Bennett and Partee, Dowry, Montague and Scott, and Vendler. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to propose a satisfying model-theoretic account of the notions of singularity, collective plurality, and distributive plurality expressed by both the nouns and the verbs of Papago according to Mathiot (1983). The approach will be algebraic in the sense of Link (1983). Informally, our proposal is that while English has only one form of plurality, Papago has two: one based on identity and the other on equivalence. The identity-based plural is one that Papago shares with (...) English and other Indo-European languages; the equivalence-based plural, on the other hand, is characteristic of Papago and other Native American languages. The extreme elaboration of the notion of multiplicity expressed in Papago follows from this proposal, given sufficiently rich models and independently motivated principles governing the semantics of roots (Wackernagel 1920; Ojeda 1993; Eschenbach 1993), markedness (Jakobson 1957), and verbs (Davidson 1967; Parsons 1990). (shrink)

This article deals with the semantics of “double-access” sentences. They are defined as English sentences which have a past tense morpheme in the matrix clause and a present tense morpheme in a subordinate clause in the immediate scope of the matrix past tense. They receive a very peculiar interpretation, which we will refer to as a “double-access interpretation.” The episode described in the embedded clause makes reference to two times: the time referred to by the matrix predicate and the utterance (...) time of the whole sentence. Previous studies on this construction are largely descriptive and do not attempt to analyze it formally, with one important exception. Abusch (1991) addresses the problems connected with the construction and proposes that double-access interpretations involvede re attitudes about intervals. Her proposal contains an important insight and provides one possible account of the double-access construction. My proposal was independently developed at approximately the same time as Abusch's and offers an alternative explanation for the phenomena. I consider a series of hypotheses and conclude that double-access readings involvede re attitude reports about state individuals. This account is couched in an eventuality-based framework and employs the techniques proposed by Cresswell and von Stechow (1982). In order to yield the desired reading, the tense must first adjoin to the complement S, then to the matrix S, leaving two traces in the process. (shrink)

This article discusses what may be referred to as ``adjectival relatives''''in Japanese and related constructions in other languages (such asadjectival passives in English). The most intriguing characteristicof this construction is that the verb contained in it occurs in the pasttense form, but its primary role is to describe a state that obtains atthe local evaluation time, rather than the past event that producedthis state. In fact, in some cases, the putative event that presumablyproduced the target state is non-existent, and the (...) entire constructionreceives a purely stative interpretation. In other words, it is possiblefor an adjectival relative to describe a target state without having itstriggering event. The proposal I put forth in the article states that whatI refer to as an adjectival relative does not have a clausal structure.It rather has a verbal projection (technically a Tense Phrase, or TP). Mod(the modifier head) then combined with TP to yield a MP (modifierphrase), which denotes a property of states that appear to have resultedfrom an event the verb describes. In order to reach this conclusion, I adopttwo additional ideas: (i) Kratzer''s (1996) idea that the so-called externalargument of a verb is not really its argument at all; (ii) direct causationdoes not have to be overtly represented in natural language syntax (Bittner1999). Having incorporated these two ideas, the proposal explains therelation between the state that the adjectival relative describes and theputative event as a modal one, thereby accounting for the non-existenceof putative past events in some examples. (shrink)

In this paper, I address a series of arguments recently put forward by Cappelen Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8: 743–762 to the effect that philosophers should not do formal semantics or be concerned with the “minutiae of natural language semantics”. He offers two paths for accessing his ideas. I argue that his arguments fail in favour of the first and cast some doubt on the second in so doing. I then proffer an alternative conception of why exactly philosophers should (...) continue to do formal linguistics which includes both semantics and syntax. (shrink)

This paper examines some aspects of the grammar of measurement based on data from non-split and split measure phrase (MP) constructions in Japanese. I claim that the non-split MP construction involves measurement of individuals, while the split MP construction involves measurement of events as well as of individuals. This claim is based on the observation that, while both constructions are subject to some semantic restrictions in the nominal domain, only the split MP construction is sensitive to restrictions in the verbal (...) domain (namely, incompatibility with single-occurrence events and with individual-level predicates, and (un)availability of collective readings). It is shown that these semantic restrictions can be explained by a uniform semantic constraint on the measure function, namely, Schwarzschild’s [(2002). The grammar of measurement. The Proceedings of Semantics and Linguistics Theory, 24, 241–306] monotonicity constraint. In particular, I argue that, in the two constructions at issue, the measure function is subject to the monotonicity constraint, and that we observe different semantic restrictions depending on whether the measure function applies to a nominal or a verbal domain. (shrink)

Ontology is the philosophical discipline which aims to understand how things in the world are divided into categories and how these categories are related together. This is exactly what information scientists aim for in creating structured, automated representations, called 'ontologies,' for managing information in fields such as science, government, industry, and healthcare. Currently, these systems are designed in a variety of different ways, so they cannot share data with one another. They are often idiosyncratically structured, accessible only to those who (...) created them, and unable to serve as inputs for automated reasoning. This volume shows, in a nontechnical way and using examples from medicine and biology, how the rigorous application of theories and insights from philosophical ontology can improve the ontologies upon which information management depends. (shrink)

Recently, von Fintel (2001) and Gillies (2007) have argued that certain sequences of counterfactuals, namely reverse Sobel sequences, should motivate us to abandon standard truth conditional theories of counterfactuals for dynamic semantic theories. I argue that we can give a pragmatic account of our judgments about counterfactuals without giving up the standard semantics. In particular, I introduce a pragmatic principle governing assertability, and I use this principle to explain a variety of subtle data concerning reverse Sobel sequences.

The most common account of attitude reports is the relational analysis according towhich an attitude verb taking that-clause complements expresses a two-placerelation between agents and propositions and the that-clause acts as an expressionwhose function is to provide the propositional argument. I will argue that a closerexamination of a broader range of linguistic facts raises serious problems for thisanalysis and instead favours a Russellian `multiple relations analysis' (which hasgenerally been discarded because of its apparent obvious linguistic implausibility).The resulting account can be (...) given independent philosophical motivations within anintentionalist view of truth and predication. (shrink)

Quantified expressions in natural language generally are taken to act like quantifiers in logic, which either range over entities that need to satisfy or not satisfy the predicate in order for the sentence to be true or otherwise are substitutional quantifiers. I will argue that there is a philosophically rather important class of quantified expressions in English that act quite differently, a class that includes something, nothing, and several things. In addition to expressing quantification, such expressions act like nominalizations, introducing (...) a new domain of objects that would not have been present in the semantic structure of the sentence otherwise. The entities those expressions introduce are of just the same sort as those that certain ordinary nominalizations refer to (such as John's wisdom or John's belief that S), namely they are tropes or entities related to tropes. Analysing certain quantifiers as nominalizing quantifiers will shed a new light on philosophical issues such as the status of properties and the nature of propositional attitudes. (shrink)

This papers argues that the apparent constraint of adverbials like 'for two hours' (or 'throughout the house') should not be viewed as a restriction to telic events or event predicates, but should be explained entirely in terms of the quantificational status of such adverials, acting as quantifiers over (contextually individuated) parts of a time interval (or spatial region).

Possible worlds semantics faces a range of difficulties for at least certain types of modals, especially deontic modals with their distinction between heavy and light permissions and obligations. This paper outlines a new semantics of modals that aims to overcome some of those difficulties. The semantics is based on an a novel ontology of modal objects, entities like obligations, permissions, needs, as well as epistemic states, abilities, and essences. Moreover, it is based on truthmaking, in the sense of Fine’s recent (...) truthmaker semantics. (shrink)

The conception of truth-making, albeit in a rudimentary form, could already be discerned in the writings of G. E. Moore and E. Husserl in the early 1900s. A few years later it was more extensively exploited by William James. It was Wittgenstein, however, who gave the concept a precise meaning. In 1913/1914 Wittgenstein advanced a theory of possible worlds, only one of which was real. Every proposition suggests a part of a possible world which does or does not correspond to (...) parts of the real world. In the first case the proposition is true, in the second case false. Moreover, the part of the real world makes the sentence true. This part is a truth-maker, and the sentence is a truth-bearer. Surprisingly enough, Wittgenstein’s concept of truth-making had its family resemblance with William James’s conception of truth. In 1915 Wittgenstein stopped using the concept of truth-making—it was also not men-tioned in the Tractatus. Unfortunately, Russell did not notice this and in 1918 he adopted the concept of truth-making. In the 1930s, it was used by some second generation analytic philosophers (Schlick, Stebbing, and Wisdom). However, it became rather popular among analytic philosophers only in the 1980s. (shrink)

This paper aims to clarify the connection between the logic of temporal distinctions and the temporal features of propositions. Contra Prior, it argues that the adoption of tense operators does not commit one to the view that propositions can change their truth value over time.

Many claims about conceptual matters are often represented as, or inferred from, claims about the meaning, reference, or mastery, of words. But sometimes this has led to treating conceptual analysis as though it were nothing but linguistic analysis. We canvass the most promising justifications for moving from linguistic premises to substantive conclusions. We show that these justifications fail and argue against current practice (in metaethics and elsewhere), which confuses an investigation of a word’s meaning, reference, or competence conditions with an (...) analysis of some concept or property associated with that word. (shrink)

Much previous work in artificial intelligence has neglected representing time in all its complexity. In particular, it has neglected continuous change and the indeterminacy of the future. To rectify this, I have developed a first‐order temporal logic, in which it is possible to name and prove things about facts, events, plans, and world histories. In particular, the logic provides analyses of causality, continuous change in quantities, the persistence of facts (the frame problem), and the relationship between tasks and actions. It (...) may be possible to implement a temporal‐inference machine based on this logic, which keeps track of several “maps” of a time line, one per possible history. (shrink)

When Booth moved his finger, thereby firing a gun, thereby killing Lincoln, did he perform three discrete actions, or were there relations of identity or inclusion among them? Most treatments of this problem have tended to assume there is but one sort of entity properly to be called an action, and hence that one answer to this question must be established to the exclusion of all others. And the favored answer has been that Booth's actions are not discrete, or indeed (...) even overlapping, but identical. It is possible, however, to adopt a more conciliatory spirit, in which a place is sought for talk of discrete or fine-grained actions in cases like this, as well as for entities of the coarser sort most have favored. (shrink)

A persistent complaint about modal forms of the ontological argument is that the characteristic modalized existence assumptions of these arguments are simply too close to the conclusion to be of much probative value in establish­ing it. I present an abstract form of the ontological argument in which the properties imputed to the divine nature by these assumptions are replaced by any of a wide class of properties of a sort I call “actualizing.” These include basic theistic attributes such as authorship, (...) sovereignty and omniscience. The import of these arguments is to show that the metaphysical coherence of some of the most familiar conceptions of the divine nature ensures their actual realization. (shrink)

We develop a framework for natural language semantics which handles intensionality via metalogical constructions and deals with degree truth values in an integrated way. We take an axiomatic set theory, ZF, as the foundation for semantic representations, but we make ZF a metalanguage for part of itself by embedding a language ℒ within ZF which is basically a copy of the part of ZF consisting of set expressions. This metalogical set-up is used for handling propositional attitude verbs (limited to believe (...) in this paper). We define a truth function τ which determines the truth value τ(p, T) of an ℒ-proposition p with respect to a theory T. Theories are sets of ℒ-propositions with associated truth values, and can be viewed as a (much more well-defined) replacement for possible worlds. We develop a mechanism for defining belief worlds as theories. We simultaneously develop two different versions of our system - a Boolean version where the set Ω of truth values is {0, 1}, and a degree-truth version where Ω is the interval [0, 1] of real numbers. We use degrees of truth in handling a broad class of semantic predicates that we call base-focus predicates, which include generalized quantifiers as well as many adverb and adjective senses and certain discourse-level predicates. (shrink)

When we talk about creation, we use the progressive and verbs of creation as in ‘Mary is building a house’. The modal account of the progressive says that a sentence such as ‘Mary is building a house’ is true just in case Mary eventually builds a house in all worlds in which her house-building proceeds normally. Recently, the modal account has come under fire from those who claim that it over-generates modal entailments and those who think the progressive should be (...) treated as a predicate of events. By properly situating the modal account within a contemporary semantic framework for natural language modals, I argue that it gives the best semantic treatment of the progressive. (shrink)

Accounts of ability in the philosophical literature have tended to be modal ones: claims about an agent’s abilities are understood in terms of what she does in certain non-actual scenarios. In contrast, a prominent account of ability ascriptions in the recent semantics literature appeals to genericity: claims about an agent’s abilities are understood in terms of what she generally manages to do. The latter account resolves some long-standing problems for modal accounts, but encounters problems of its own. I propose a (...) hybrid view, on which ability involves both a modal and a generic element. (shrink)

This book's purpose is to detail the anatomy of linguistic meaning, showing how the various elements of meaning fit together. part 1 defends the truth-theoretic conception of semantics, taking the notion of a sentence's truth-condition as the core of meaning. part 2 explores the complex interconnections between syntax, semantics and various pragmatic notions and attempts to reconcile the apparent differences between natural and formal language. part 3 examines the relation between semantics and psychology.

In this paper, we outline an approach to giving extensional truth-theoretic semantics for what have traditionally been seen as opaque sentential contexts. We outline an approach to providing a compositional truth-theoretic semantics for opaque contexts which does not require quantifying over intensional entities of any kind, and meets standard objections to such accounts. The account we present aims to meet the following desiderata on a semantic theory T for opaque contexts: (D1) T can be formulated in a first-order extensional language; (...) (D2) T does not require quantification over intensional entities­i.e., meanings, propositions, properties, relations, or the like­in its treatment of opaque contexts; (D3) T captures the entailment relations that hold in virtue of form between sentences in the language for which it is a theory; (D4) T has a finite number of axioms. If the approach outlined here is correct, it resolves a longstanding complex of problems in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of language. (shrink)

This is a review of Kathrin Gluer's Donald Davidson: A Short Introduction. A dispute about the grounding of the Principle of Charity is discussed, and some resources Davidson has for responding to a criticism of his theory of action.

This paper offers an analysis of the logical form of plural action sentences that shows that collective actions so ascribed are a matter of all members of a group contributing to bringing some event about. It then uses this as the basis for a reductive account of the content of we-intentions according to which what distinguishes we-intentions from I-intentions is that we-intentions are directed about bringing it about that members of a group act in accordance with a shared plan.

This reviews, motivates, and extends the event analysis of action sentences and shows how it explains the compositionally of adverbial modification of action verbs and event verbs more generally. It includes a treatment of intensional adverbs like 'intentionally' and how it can be extended to the collective reading of plural action sentences.

In this paper, we argue that, omissions are not events or actions, but rather fact-like entities, and that, insofar as only events and actions can be causes, omissions cannot be causes. Nevertheless, since omissions can, and often do, play a role in the explanations of events, their place in such explanations must be found; and an attempt to find such a place is made.

A recent popular analysis of English indefinites isthat they involve a choice function mechanism in their semantic interpretation. However,there are diversified views regarding how intermediate scope readings should be dealt withand which level(s) existential closure should apply to. This paper attempts to make acontribution to this debate by examining existential polarity wh-phrases in Chinese. I showthat unlike the behaviors of polarity indefinites in St''át''imcets reported by Matthewson(1999), intermediate scope readings are possible for polarity wh-phrases in Chinese but aresubject to some (...) locality conditions. I suggest that implicit arguments of choice functionsmight have a parametric value the choice of which affects availability of intermediate readings.The findings in this paper thus revive the possibility, rejected by Matthewson (1999), that thechoice function mechanism may vary from language to language or from indefinite NPs in onelanguage to indefinite NPs in another language or even from one type of indefiniteNP to another type of indefinite NP within the same language. (shrink)

This paper argues that superiority comparatives in Mandarin Chinese are all phrasal comparatives that can be directly interpreted, and makes a new suggestion of taking the bǐ-phrase (‘compare-phrase’) to be an adjunct and one constituent, but with bǐ-shells. This syntactic analysis allows one to combine into one phrase various compared constituents that would otherwise not be analyzed as forming a phrase by themselves. Semantically, in extension of work by Heim as well as Bhatt and Takahashi, bǐ is taken to compare (...) two sequences of arguments of a gradable predicate along the dimension given by that predicate. It is also suggested that comparatives across languages may be subject to three parameters: (i) argument-dependent comparison vs. non-argument dependent comparison, (ii) phrasal comparison vs. clausal comparison, and (iii) monoadic comparison vs. dyadic comparison. (shrink)

This paper proposes an Interface Transparency Thesis concerning how linguistic meanings are related to the cognitive systems that are used to evaluate sentences for truth/falsity: a declarative sentence S is semantically associated with a canonical procedure for determining whether S is true; while this procedure need not be used as a verification strategy, competent speakers are biased towards strategies that directly reflect canonical specifications of truth conditions. Evidence in favor of this hypothesis comes from a psycholinguistic experiment examining adult judgments (...) concerning ‘Most of the dots are blue’. This sentence is true if and only if the number of blue dots exceeds the number of nonblue dots. But this leaves unsettled, e.g., how the second cardinality is specified for purposes of understanding and/or verification: via the nonblue things, given a restriction to the dots, as in ‘|{x: Dot(x) & ~Blue(x)}|’; via the blue things, given the same restriction, and subtraction from the number of dots, as in ‘|{x: Dot(x)}| – |{x: Dot(x) & Blue(x)}|’; or in some other way. Psycholinguistic evidence and psychophysical modeling support the second hypothesis. (shrink)

This article studies a type of comparative in Mandarin Chinese, which has rarely been discussed in the literature (Cheng 1966). I refer to them as Differential Verbal Comparatives (DVCs). I show that DVCs, unlike Chinese adjectival and adverbial comparatives, allow differentials that are definite DPs, for example, Jane Eyre he Pride and Prejudice ‘Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice’. Based on this fact and other empirical differences between DVCs and adjectival/adverbial comparatives in Mandarin Chinese, I motivate and develop a mapping-based (...) semantic analysis of DVCs and argue that this analysis fares better than a degree-based analysis. (shrink)