Whether or not deflationism is compatible with truth-conditional theories of meaning has often been discussed in very broad terms. This paper only focuses on Davidsonian semantics and Brandom's anaphoric deflationism and defends the claim that these are perfectly compatible. Critics of this view have voiced several objections, the most prominent of which claims that it involves an unacceptable form of circularity. The paper discusses how this general objection applies to the case of anaphoric deflationism and Davidsonian semantics and evaluates different (...) ways of responding to it (Williams 1999, Horisk 2008 and Lance 1997). Then, three further objections to the compatibility of these theories are assessed and eventually dismissed (Horisk 2007, Patterson 2005 and Collins 2002). It is shown how these considerations shed light on core issues of the debate. (shrink)

This paper has three main aims: it introduces – to a non-German readership – a specific branch of linguistic discourse analysis that has evolved in Germanic linguistics since the late 1980s – Diskurslinguistik, it raises some methodical and methodological issues that are currently discussed within this discourse-linguistic branch and it presents a model that addresses these methodological issues. We hope to provide the reader with some impetus to a general methodological debate within linguistic discourse analysis that intensely re-reflects both its (...) complex subject matter and the diverse approaches to this matter, i.e. to discourse. (shrink)

The term ‘ellipsis’ can be used to refer to a variety of phenomena: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. In this article, I discuss the recent comprehensive survey by Stainton 2006 of these kinds of ellipsis with respect to the analysis of nonsententials and try to show that despite his trenchant criticisms and insightful proposal, some of the criticisms can be evaded and the insights incorporated into a semantic ellipsis analysis, making a ‘divide-and-conquer’ strategy to the properties of nonsententials feasible after all. (...) -/- Editor's comment: To find the contribution, please go to item 16 of the URL, which contains the full text. Professor Merchant has permitted this. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric Jahrgang: 45 Heft: 1 Seiten: 97-110.

The paper analyzes the collection of the Northern Irish poet Frank Ormsby entitled A Northern Spring published in 1986. On the basis of selected poems, the author of this paper aims to examine the poet’s reflections about World War II, the lives of the soldiers, and the things that remain after a military combat, which are both physical and illusive. The poems included in the volume present the author’s reflections upon the senselessness of war and dying, short lives of the (...) soldiers, the awareness of their own meaninglessness in comparison to the broader picture, and the contradictory and desperate need to be remembered nevertheless. They also show what is left of the soldiers and the war, as well as how life goes on, with or without them. (shrink)

An extensive analysis of all social psychology textbooks included a history chapter published in French between 1947 and 2001, provides a rich corpus for the study of the history of social psychology. Drawing upon this corpus, in this article we study the historical spaces of social psychology in order to show how the discipline was located in geographical, urban, institutional and collective spaces. We argue that spaces are essentially related to some solitary and consensual scholars' names without any informative reference (...) to their institutions, nor to any trace of collective work. Moreover, we try to highlight several styles, ways and norms of collective writing the history of this discipline. (shrink)

In Part III of his 1879 logic Frege proves a theorem in the theory of sequences on the basis of four definitions. He claims in Grundlagen that this proof, despite being strictly deductive, constitutes a real extension of our knowledge, that it is ampliative rather than merely explicative. Frege furthermore connects this idea of ampliative deductive proof to what he thinks of as a fruitful definition, one that draws new lines. My aim is to show that we can make good (...) sense of these claims if we read Frege’s notation diagrammatically, in particular, if we take that notation to have been designed to enable one to exhibit the (inferentially articulated) contents of concepts in a way that allows one to reason deductively on the basis of those contents. (shrink)

Next SectionBy discussing a novel paradigm, it is shown that the likeliness of an operator to trigger an intervention effect in a wh-in-situ question is determined by the logical properties of that operator (contra Beck 1996a, 2006, for instance). A new empirical generalization accounting for the differences between operators in their ability to cause intervention and improving on existing analyses is suggested. This generalization is fully predictive and allows one to not have to list in the lexicon whether an intervener (...) is problematic or not. It is implemented as a formal condition on wh-questions in a version of Hamblin 1973's/Karttunen 1977's question semantics that makes crucial use of Chierchia 2006's domain alternatives. (shrink)