In a series of papers, Donald Davidson :3–17, 1984, The philosophical grounds of rationality, 1986, Midwest Stud Philos 16:1–12, 1991) developed a powerful argument against the claim that linguistic conventions provide any explanatory purchase on an account of linguistic meaning and communication. This argument, as I shall develop it, turns on cases of what I call lexical innovation: cases in which a speaker uses a sentence containing a novel expression-meaning pair, but nevertheless successfully communicates her intended meaning to her audience. (...) I will argue that cases of lexical innovation motivate a dynamic conception of linguistic conventions according to which background linguistic conventions may be rapidly expanded to incorporate new word meanings or shifted to revise the meanings of words already in circulation. I argue that this dynamic account of conventions both resolves the problem raised by cases of lexical innovation and that it does so in a way that is preferable to those who—like Davidson—deny important explanatory roles for linguistic conventions. (shrink)

Quine (1960, Word and object. Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, ch. 2) claims that there are a variety of equally good schemes for translating or interpreting ordinary talk. ‘Rabbit’ might be taken to divide its reference over rabbits, over temporal slices of rabbits, or undetached parts of rabbits, without significantly affecting which sentences get classified as true and which as false. This is the basis of his famous ‘argument from below’ to the conclusion that there can be no fact of the matter (...) as to how reference is to be divided. Putative counterexamples to Quine’s claim have been put forward in the past (see especially Evans 1975; 1975, Journal of Philosophy, LXXII(13), 343–362. Reprinted in McDowell (Ed.), Gareth Evans: Collected papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press.), and various patches have been suggested (e.g. Wright (1997, The indeterminacy of translation. In C. Wright & B. Hale (Eds.), A companion to the philosophy of language (pp. 397–426). Oxford: Blackwell)). One lacuna in this literature is that one does not find any detailed presentation of what exactly these interpretations are supposed to be. Drawing on contemporary literature on persistence, the present paper sets out detailed semantic treatments for fragments of English, whereby predicates such as ‘rabbit’ divide their reference over four-dimensional continuants (Quine’s rabbits), instantaneous temporal slices of those continuants (Quine’s rabbit-slices) and the simple elements which compose those slices (undetached rabbit parts) respectively. Once we have the systematic interpretations on the table, we can get to work evaluating them. (shrink)

This paper analyzes a non-temporal interpretation of the adverb sempre “always” in European Portuguese and Italian, in which the adverb expresses persistence of the truth of a proposition over time and displays specific contextual constraints (TP-sempre). Despite an overlap in the contexts in which TP-sempre may occur in both languages, we provide data showing that its distribution is not exactly the same in European Portuguese and Italian. In view of these data, we propose that TP-sempre is a modal operator of (...) confirmation in both languages, but that it is more restricted in Italian in that it has a plan presupposition only in this language. (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)

In this paper, I develop a novel interval-based approach to some well-known semantic puzzles related to aspect shift, in particular, to the interaction of for-adverbials with accomplishment and achievement verbs that take indefinite, bare plural, and mass noun complements. My approach is based on the insight that implicit frequentative aspect plays a central role in this interaction, a fact that was largely ignored in previous analyses. Specifically, I interpret frequentative aspect as an abstract verb-level pluractional operator that brings about aspect (...) shift and that is responsible for the distribution of subevent times and subevent participants over the event time of an atelic sentence. What Zucchi and White (2001) call "the aspectual effect of frequency adverbs" thus becomes the general rule for all frequentatively understood for-adverbial sentences. Linguistic support for silent verb-level frequentativity in English is drawn from overt frequentative aspect marking in West Greenlandic verbs. (shrink)

This paper gives an analysis of the adverbial quantifiers exemplified in “I regretted it every time I had dinner with him.” Sentences of this kind display what I call a ‘matching effect’; they are true if every event in the denotation oftime I had dinner with him can be matched with an event regretting that dinner event. They are thus truth-conditionally equivalent to sentences of the form “There are at least as many As as Bs.” The difficulties of giving a (...) compositional interpretation to sentences of this form have been discussed in, e.g., Boolos 1981. I first show that the matching effect is semantic and not pragmatic. I then give an analysis of these sentences in a neo-Davidsonian framework, interpreting the adverbials as quantifiers over events. Syntactically they are analyzed as objects of a null preposition. This allows a simple compositional semantic interpretation in which the null preposition is interpreted exactly as other prepositions are by Davidson (1967), namely as denoting a function from the event argument of the matrix verb to the prepositional object. The matching effect then follows automatically. I extend the analysis to account for other sentences which directly instantiate the schema “For every A there is a B” and its equivalents, and show how the matching effect follows in general from the functional nature of thematic roles and prepositions. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of the semantics of copular be as displayed in its behaviour in be+AP configurations. I begin by arguing against the Partee/Dowty distinction between a semantically null be of predication and a thematically relevant agentive be, and I propose that there is one semantically relevant verb whose grammatical role is to turn an AP predicate into a verbal one. The denotation of be must thus be a function from denotations of Adjective Phrases to denotation of Verb (...) Phrases. I argue that these denotations are crucially different in kind: verbs (and thus VPs) denote eventualities, which are count entities and which are temporally locatable, while adjectives (and thus APs) denote mass entities, which are states and which are not temporally locatable. Be thus denotes a locating function which maps from the mass to the count domain, and is the analogue of the ‘packaging’ function in the nominal domain. After a comparison between the mass/count distinction in the verbal and nominal domains, I show how this theory accounts for properties of be in small clause and progressive constructions which have hitherto been explained by positing a so-called agentive be. (shrink)

This paper proposes that a core semantic property of temporal locating adverbs is the ability to introduce a new time discourse referent. The core data comes from that same day in narrative discourse. I argue that unlike other previously studied temporal locating adverbs—which introduce a new time discourse referent and relate it to the speech time or a salient time introduced into the discourse context—that same day is ‘twice anaphoric’, i.e. it retrieves two salient times from the input context without (...) introducing one of its own. Moreover, I argue that the adverb currently is like that same day in not introducing a new time discourse referent. Unlike that same day, however, currently has both a deictic and an anaphoric usage analogous to on Sunday. The analysis that I propose is implemented within Compositional Discourse Representation Theory. It illustrates how adverbial meaning can be integrated within a more general theory of temporal interpretation. (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)

The wide range of interpretations of aoristic and imperfective aspect in Ancient Greek cannot be attributed to unambiguous aspectual operators but suggest an analysis in terms of coercion in the spirit of de Swart (Nat Lang Linguist Theory 16:347–385, 1998). But since such an analysis cannot explain the Ancient Greek data, we combine Klein’s (Time in language, 1994) theory of tense and aspect with Egg’s (Flexible semantics for reinterpretation phenomena, 2005) aspectual coercion approach. Following Klein. (grammatical) aspect relates the runtime (...) of an eventuality and the current time of reference (topic time). We claim that these relations can trigger aspectual selection restrictions (and subsequent aspectual coercions) just like e.g. aspectually relevant temporal adverbials, and are furthermore susceptible to the Duration Principle of Egg (Flexible semantics for reinterpretation phenomena, 2005): Properties of eventualities must be compatible with respect to the duration they specify for an eventuality. The Duration Principle guides the selection between different feasible coercion operators in cases of aspectual coercion but can also trigger coercions of its own. We analyse the interpretations of aorist and imperfective as cases of coercion that avoid impending violations of aspectual selection restrictions or of the Duration Principle, which covers cases that are problematic for de Swart’s (Nat Lang Linguist Theory 16:347–385, 1998) analysis. (shrink)

This paper contributes data from Paraguayan Guaraní (Tupí-Guaraní) to the discussion of how temporal reference is determined in tenseless languages. The empirical focus of this study is on finite clauses headed by verbs inflected only for person/number information, which are compatible only with non-future temporal reference in most matrix clause contexts. The paper first explores the possibility of accounting for the temporal reference of such clauses with a phonologically empty non-future tense morpheme, along the lines of Matthewson’s (Linguist Philos 29:673–713, (...) 2006 ) analysis of a similar phenomenon in St’át’imcets (Salish). This analysis is then contrasted with one according to which temporal reference is not constrained by tense in Paraguayan Guaraní, but only by context and temporal adverbials. A comparison of the two analyses, both of which are couched in a dynamic semantic framework, suggests empirical and theoretical advantages of the tenseless analysis over the tensed one. The paper concludes with a discussion of cross-linguistic variation of temporal reference in tensed and tenseless languages. (shrink)

In this talk, I first systematize the analogies and complete the picture in some corners. Then, I formally relate the three constructions, and I derive their properties from a single operator. Previous analyses were not designed to account for all three constructions at the same time. Accordingly, I not only assess how well they generalize beyond their intended purpose, but I also evaluate them in their own right. Even so, this analysis improves on previous accounts in several ways. Although I (...) will not focus on this in the talk, the analysis of distributive quantification is compatible with more general analyses of cumulative and collective quantification such as Landman (2000). (shrink)

There are numerous occasions on which we need to reason about a finite number of events. And we often need to consider only those events which are given or which we perceive. These give rise to the Criteria of Finiteness and Closedness. Allen's logic provides a way of reasoning about events. In this paper I examine Allen and Hayes' axiomatisation of this logic, and develop two other axiomatisations based on the work by Russell and Thomason. I shall show that these (...) three axiomatisations are weakly equivalent, and that only the last two meet the Criteria of Finiteness and Closedness (to different degrees). I shall then examine two ways of constructing instants of time in a finite and closed world, i.e. the Russell construction and the Thomason construction. I shall prove that these two constructions are equivalent under certain conditions. (shrink)

I argue that linguistic meanings are instructions to build monadic concepts that lie between lexicalizable concepts and truth-evaluable judgments. In acquiring words, humans use concepts of various adicities to introduce concepts that can be fetched and systematically combined via certain conjunctive operations, which require monadic inputs. These concepts do not have Tarskian satisfaction conditions. But they provide bases for refinements and elaborations that can yield truth-evaluable judgments. Constructing mental sentences that are true or false requires cognitive work, not just an (...) exercise of basic linguistic capacities. (shrink)

This paper discusses the interaction of aspect and modality, and focuses on the puzzling implicative effect that arises when perfective aspect appears on certain modals: perfective somehow seems to force the proposition expressed by the complement of the modal to hold in the actual world, and not merely in some possible world. I show that this puzzling behavior, originally discussed in Bhatt (1999, Covert modality in non-finite contexts) for the ability modal, extends to all modal auxiliaries with a circumstantial modal (...) base (i.e., root modals ), while epistemic interpretations of the same modals are immune to the effect. I propose that implicative readings are contingent on the relative position of the modal w.r.t. aspect: when aspect scopes over the modal (as I argue is the case for root modals), it forces an actual event, thereby yielding an implicative reading. When a modal element scopes over aspect, no actual event is forced. This happens (i) with epistemics, which structurally appear above tense and aspect; (ii) with imperfective on a root modal: imperfective brings in an additional layer of modality, itself responsible for removing the necessity for an actual event. This proposal enables us to solve the puzzle while maintaining a standardized semantics for aspects and modals. (shrink)

The adjectival passive construction that is traditionally called ‘Zustandspassiv’ (‘state passive’) in German seems to have the same syntactic and semantic properties as its English cousin, except that it is easier to identify. German state or adjectival passives select the auxiliary sein (‘be’), and are therefore clearly distinguished from verbal or ‘Vorgangs’- passives (‘process passives’), which use the auxiliary werden (‘get’, ‘become’). In spite of their appearance, German state passives do not form a homogenious class, however. There are two important (...) subclasses that behave differently with respect to the adverbial immer noch (‘still’), for example2. (shrink)

This paper is about the semantic analysis of referentially opaque verbs like seek and owe that give rise to nonspecific readings. It is argued that Montague's categorization (based on earlier work by Quine) of opaque verbs as properties of quantifiers runs into two serious difficulties: the first problem is that it does not work with opaque verbs like resemble that resist any lexical decomposition of the seek ap try to find kind; the second one is that it wrongly predicts de (...) dicto (i.e. narrow scope) readings due to quantified noun phrases in the object positions of such verbs. It is shown that both difficulties can be overcome by an analysis of opaque verbs as operating on properties. This is a strongly modified version of a paper entitled lsquoDo We Bear Attitudes towards Quantifiers?rsquo that I have presented at conferences in Gosen (Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft), Ithaca (SALT I), and Konstanz (Lexikon). I owe a special debt to Hans Kamp and Arnim von Stechow for shaping my views on the subject of this paper during the past ten years or so. Comments from and discussions with the following friends and colleagues have also led to considerable improvements: Heinrich Beck, Steve Berman, David Dowty, Veerle van Geenhoven, Fritz Hamm, Irene Heim, Wolfgang Klein, Angelika Kratzer, Michael Morreau, Barbara Partee, Mats Rooth, Roger Schwarzschild, Wolfgang Sternefeld, Emil Weydert, Henk Zeevat, and three referees. (shrink)

While proper names in argument positions have received a lot of attention, this cannot be said about proper names in the naming construction, as in “Call me Al”. I argue that in a number of more or less familiar languages the syntax of naming constructions is such that proper names there have to be analyzed as predicates, whose content mentions the name itself (cf. “quotation theories”). If proper names can enter syntax as predicates, then in argument positions they should have (...) a complex structure, consisting of a determiner and its restriction, like common nouns (cf. “definite description theories of proper names”). Further consideration of the compositional semantics of proper names in the naming construction also shows that they have another argument slot, that of the naming convention. As a result, we will be able to account for the indexicality of proper names in argument positions and provide compositional semantics of complex and modified proper names (e.g., the famous detective Sherlock Holmes ). (shrink)

This book present a unified semantic theory of expressions involving the notions of part and whole. It develops a theory of part structures which differs from traditional (extensional) mereological theories in that the notion of an integrated whole plays a central role and in that the part structure of an entity is allowed to vary across different situations, perspectives, and dimensions. The book presents a great range of empirical generalizations involving plurals, mass nouns, adnominal and adverbial modifiers such as 'whole', (...) 'together', and 'alone', nominal and adverbial quanitfiers ranging over parts, and expressions of completion such as 'completely' and 'partly'. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate how certain types of predicates should be connected with certain types of degree scales, and how this can affect the events they describe. The distribution and interpretation of various degree adverbials will serve us as a guideline in this perspective. They suggest that two main types of degree scales should be distinguished: (i) quantity scales, which are characterized by the semantic equivalence of Yannig ate the cake partially and Yannig ate part of the cake; quantity (...) scales only appear with verbs possessing an incremental theme (cf. Dowty 1991); (ii) intensity scales, which are characterized by degree modifiers (e.g., extremely, perfectly) receiving an intensive interpretation; intensity scales typically occur with verbs morphologically related to an adjective (to dry). More generally, we capitalize on a typology of degree structures to explain how degrees play a central role with respect to event structure. (shrink)

In English, [1e] occurs only in have got, but it is included here because of its importance in other languages. In Vedic Sanskrit and ancient Greek, for example, the perfect of many achievement predicates can be used to denote the result state. A good semantics of the perfect should therefore have something to say about it.

Reichenbach's event, reference and speech times are interpreted semantically by stringing and superposing sets of temporal formulae, structured within regular languages. Notions of continuation branches and of inertia, bound (in a precise sense) by reference time, are developed and applied to the progressive and the perfect.

In this paper it is shown how the DRT (Discourse Representation Theory) treatment of temporal anaphora can be formalized within a version of Montague Semantics that is based on classical type logic.

This thesis aims to develop a psychologically plausible account of concepts by integrating key insights from philosophy (on the metaphysical basis for concept possession) and psychology (on the mechanisms underlying concept acquisition). I adopt an approach known as informational atomism, developed by Jerry Fodor. Informational atomism is the conjunction of two theses: (i) informational semantics, according to which conceptual content is constituted exhaustively by nomological mind–world relations; and (ii) conceptual atomism, according to which (lexical) concepts have no internal structure. I (...) argue that informational semantics needs to be supplemented by allowing content-constitutive rules of inference (“meaning postulates”). This is because the content of one important class of concepts, the logical terms, is not plausibly informational. And since, it is argued, no principled distinction can be drawn between logical concepts and the rest, the problem that this raises is a general one. An immediate difficulty is that Quine’s classic arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction suggest that there can be no principled basis for distinguishing content-constitutive rules from the rest. I show that this concern can be overcome by taking a psychological approach: there is a fact of the matter as to whether or not a particular inference is governed by a mentally-represented inference rule, albeit one that analytic philosophy does not have the resources to determine. I then consider the implications of this approach for concept acquisition. One mechanism underlying concept acquisition is the development of perceptual detectors for the objects that we encounter. I investigate how this might work, by drawing on recent ideas in ethology on ‘learning instincts’, and recent insights into the neurological basis for perceptual learning. What emerges is a view of concept acquisition as involving a complex interplay between innate constraints and environmental input. This supports Fodor’s recent move away from radical concept nativism: concept acquisition requires innate mechanisms, but does not require that concepts themselves be innate. (shrink)

A critical review of the main themes arising out of recent literature on the semantics of ordinary event talk. The material is organized in four sections: (i) the nature of events, with emphasis on the opposition between events as particulars and events as universals; (ii) identity and indeterminacy, with emphasis on the unifier/multiplier controversy; (iii) events and logical form, with emphasis on Davidson’s treatment of the form of action sentences; (iv) linguistic applications, with emphasis on issues concerning aspectual phenomena, the (...) telicity/atelicity distinction, the treatment of statives, and temporal quantification. (shrink)

This paper is a critical examination of Vendler's well-known aspectual classes (states, activities, accomplishments, achievements). It is argued that it not classes that play a role in the explanation of aspectual phenomena but rather some specific semantic factors from which aspectual classes can be constructed, in particular factors inherent to the (lexical) verb and to the determiners of noun phrases.

Every criminal act ought to be matched by a corresponding punishment, or so we may suppose, and every punishment ought to reflect a criminal act. We know how to count punishments. But how do we count crimes? In particular, how does our notion of a criminal action depend on whether the prohibited action is an activity, an accomplishment, an achievement, or a state?

Artificial agents, which are embedded in a virtual world, need to interpret a sequence of commands given to them adequately, considering the temporal structure for each command. In this paper, we start with the semantics of natural language and classify the temporal structures of various eventualities into such aspectual classes as action, process, and event. In order to formalize these temporal structures, we adopt Arrow Logic. This logic specifies the domain for the valuation of a sentence as an arrow. We (...) can connect, or give order to, arrows by defining inter-arrow operations, and can give different views for sentences. Thereafter we formalize the rules of aspectual shifts in situated inference, in the style of a logic programming language. Thus, we not only describe the static representation of temporal features, but also show the dynamic process to deduce how each eventuality is viewed. The rules are applied to the information flow through the sequence of commands; therefore, we consider how the temporal structure of a command affects the succeeding commands. (shrink)

Case-based reasoning has played an important role in legal reasoning systems. As one criteria for similarity of cases, temporal relationsamong affairs in legal cases should be compared. Thus far in many legalreasoning systems, cases have been described as sequences of pointwiseevents, or at best, simple time intervals, and they have been related bypredicates such as before, after, while,and so on. However, such relations may depend on each implementer'spersonal view, and also require much labor to write down by hand. In this (...) paper, we first propose a classification of affair types by their temporal features, and according to those types, we propose several assumption rules that prescribe the temporal relations between affair types. The temporal relations are automatically generated by these rules. Thereafter, we discuss how thesetemporal relations work in the comparison of similarity of cases. Inthe process of comparison, inadequate temporal relations need to beamended. For this purpose, we introduce revision rules, that refute theresults of assumption rules. (shrink)

While monadic second-order logic (MSO) has played a prominent role in model theoretic syntax, modal logics have been used in this context since its inception. When comparing propositional dynamic logic (PDL) to MSO over trees, Kracht (1997) noted that there are tree languages that can be defined in MSO that can only be defined in PDL by adding new features whose distribution is predictable. He named such features “inessential features”. We show that Kracht’s observation can be extended to other modal (...) logics of trees in two ways. First, we demonstrate that for each stronger logic, there exists a tree language that can only be defined in a weaker logic with inessential features. Second, we show that any tree language that can be defined in a stronger logic, but not in some weaker logic, can be defined with inessential features. Additionally, we consider Kracht’s definition of inessential features more closely. It turns out that there are features whose distribution can be predicted, but who fail to be inessential in Kracht’s sense. We will look at ways to modify his definition. (shrink)

What I have attempted to show in the foregoing is that: (1) For any frequency adjective f, there is an element of meaning common to both the adverbial and the generic usage of f; this is a function f′ from propositions to truth-values such that f′(Φ)′ is true at an interval i iff Φ′ is true at subintervals of i distributed through i in a certain way. (2) In an adverbial use of f, f′ functions like the corresponding frequency adverb. (...) (3) In a generic use of f, f′ quantifies the times intervals which a specified object is realized by some stage. (4) In their adverbial usage, frequency adjectives are not regular attributive adjectives at the level at which interpretation takes place, but are perhaps determiners. And (5) in their generic usage, frequency adjectives are adjectives at the level at which interpretation takes place.More generally, I hope to have suggested something of the range of uses to which frequency is put in natural language. That we effortlessly grasp what is meants by Monday, the Columbus Dispatch, autumn, the Today Show, and so on, demonstrates our fluency in interpreting certain sequences of objects, events, or states of affairs as sequences of values of some function cycling on a time-axis. Much more must ultimately be told about the psychological and anthropological significance of frequency. (shrink)

In this paper, we show how the problem of accounting for the semanticsof temporal preposition phrases (tPPs) leads us to some surprisinginsights into the semantics of temporal expressions ingeneral. Specifically, we argue that a systematic treatment of EnglishtPPs is greatly facilitated if we endow our meaning assignments with context variables, a device which allows a tPP to restrict domainsof quantification arising elsewhere in a sentence. We observe that theuse of context variables implies that tPPs can modify expressions intwo ways, and (...) we use this observation to predict the behaviour of tPPswhose complements are themselves modified by other tPPs. (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)

By accepting the above proposals for translating tenses it appears possible to achieve a very general account of the interpretation of Warlpiri adjoined clauses. Moreover, if the analysis is correct it would provide an interesting example of natural language generalizing across tenses and NPs, since what we would have is a single syntactic construction whose interpretation varied according to whether an NP or a tense were translated with a distinguished variable. These results thus serve to pose once again the question (...) of where precisely the common features of tenses and NPs reside. Recent work applying model-theoretic techniques to natural language semantics may well provide an answer. Thus in Dowty (1979) and Larson and Cooper (1980) NPs and tenses both denote the same sort of set-theoretic object, viz., sets of sets. Within generalized quantification theory this is just to say that both NPs and tenses denote quantifiers (cf. Barwise and Cooper, 1981, for much illuminating information on quantifiers and natural language). It may thus be possible to view the interpretation of Warlpiri adjoined clauses as a case of natural language generalizing across the semantic type of quantifiers. (shrink)

The present paper is the result of a long struggle to understand how the notion of compositionality can be used to motivate the structure of a sentence. While everyone seems to have intuitions about which proposals are compositional and which ones are not, these intuitions generally have no formal basis. What is needed to make such arguments work is a proper understanding of what meanings are and how they can be manipulated. In particular, we need a definition of meaning that (...) bans all mentioning of syntactic structure; it is not the task of semantics to state in which way things are put together in syntax. The present paper presents such a theory of meaning. This, in tandem with some minimal assumptions on the syntactic process (that there can be no deletion) yield surprisingly deep insights into natural language. First, it rehabilitates a lot of linguistic work as necessary on semantic grounds and defends it against potential claims of redundancy. For example, θ-roles and linking are an integral part of semantics, and not syntax. To assume the latter is to put the cart before the horse. Second, as a particular example we shall show that Dutch is not strongly context free even if weakly context free. To our knowledge, this is the first formal proof of this fact. (shrink)

The empirical nature of our understanding of language is explored. I first show that there are several important and different distinctions between tacit and accessible awareness. I then present empirical evidence concerning our understanding of language. The data suggests that our awareness of sentence-meanings is sometimes merely tacit according to one of these distinctions, but is accessible according to another. I present and defend an interpretation of this mixed view. The present project is shown to impact on several diverse areas, (...) including inferential role semantics and holism, the nature of learning, and the role of linguistics in the law. (shrink)

Quine (1960, "Word and object". Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ch. 2) claims that there are a variety of equally good schemes for translating or interpreting ordinary talk. 'Rabbit' might be taken to divide its reference over rabbits, over temporal slices of rabbits, or undetached parts of rabbits, without significantly affecting which sentences get classified as true and which as false. This is the basis of his famous 'argument from below' to the conclusion that there can be no fact of the (...) matter as to how reference is to be divided. Putative counterexamples to Quine's claim have been put forward in the past (see especially Evans (1975, "Journal of Philosophy", LXXII(13), 343-362. Reprinted in McDowell (Ed.), "Gareth Evans: Collected papers." Oxford: Clarendon Press.), Fodor (1993, "The elm and the expert: Mentalese and its semantics." Cambridge, MA: Bradford)), and various patches have been suggested (e. g. Wright (1997, The indeterminacy of translation. In C. Wright & B. Hale (Eds.), "A companion to the philosophy of language" (pp. 397-426). Oxford: Blackwell)). One lacuna in this literature is that one does not find any detailed presentation of what exactly these interpretations are supposed to be. Drawing on contemporary literature on persistence, the present paper sets out detailed semantic treatments for fragments of English, whereby predicates such as 'rabbit' divide their reference over four-dimensional continuants (Quine's rabbits), instantaneous temporal slices of those continuants (Quine's rabbitslices) and the simple elements which compose those slices (undetached rabbit parts) respectively. Once we have the systematic interpretations on the table, we can get to work evaluating them. (shrink)

Whether or not the particular view of generic sentences articulated above is correct, it is quite clear that the study of generic terms and the truth-conditions of generic sentences touches on the representation of other parts of the grammar, as well as on how the world around us is reflected in language. I would hope that the problems mentioned above will highlight the relevance of semantic analysis to other apparently distinct questions, and focus attention on the relevance of linguistic problems (...) to other already established areas of inquiry. (shrink)

There are languages – e.g., German, Inuktitut, andRussian – in which the aspectual reference of clausesdepends on the telicity of their event predicates. Weargue that in such languages, clauses or verb phrasesnot overtly marked for viewpoint aspect implicateor entail `event realization'', a property akin toParsons''s (1990) `culmination''. The aspectualreference associated with the use of clauses notovertly marked for aspect is computed in accordancewith the dependence of realization conditions ontelicity and in line with principles of Gricean pragmatics.We formalize event realization and (...) capture thetelicity-dependent patterns of aspectual reference onwhich it is based by combining Krifka''s (1989, 1992,1998) event lattices with a model-theoreticinterpretation of Klein''s (1994) theory of tense andaspect. The latter permits us to treat the `topic times''of aspectual operators as temporal constraints on event realization. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that temporal anaphora in French and English depends on the aspectual distinction between events and states. For example, temporal location as well as temporal update depends on the aspectual type. This paper presents a general theory of aspect-based temporal anaphora, which extends from languages with grammatical tenses (like French and English) to tenseless languages (e.g. Kalaallisut). This theory also extends to additional aspect-dependent phenomena and to non-atomic aspectual types, processes and habits, which license anaphora to (...) proper atomic parts (cf. nominal pluralities and kinds). (shrink)

The thesis that mental states are physical states enjoys widespread popularity. After the abandonment of typeidentity theories, however, this thesis has typically been framed in terms of state tokens. I argue that token states are a philosopher’s fiction, and that debates about the identity of mental and physical state tokens thus rest on a mistake.