If correct, Christopher Peacocke’s [20] “manifestationism without verificationism,” would explode the dichotomy between realism and inferentialism in the contemporary philosophy of language. I first explicate Peacocke’s theory, defending it from a criticism of Neil Tennant’s. This involves devising a recursive definition for grasp of logical contents along the lines Peacocke suggests. Unfortunately though, the generalized account reveals the Achilles’ heel of the whole theory. By inventing a new logical operator with the introduction rule for the existential quantifier and the elimination (...) rule for the universal quantifier, I am able to show that Peacocke’s theory only avoids verificationism to the extent that it does not satisfy manifestationism. (shrink)

‘Only’ associates with focus and licenses NPIs. This paper looks at the distributional pattern of NPIs under ‘only’ and presents evidence for the movement theory of focus association and against an in situ approach. NPIs are licensed in the ‘scope’ (or the second argument) of ‘only’, but not in the complement (or its first argument), which I will call the ‘syntactic restrictor’. While earlier approaches argued that ‘only’ licenses NPIs in the unfocused part of the sentence it occurs in except (...) in its focus, evidence from DP-‘only’ shows that NPIs are also not licensed in the unfocused part of the syntactic restrictor. The distribution of NPIs provides a test for the size of the syntactic restrictor, and this test is applied to the case of VP-‘only’. The evidence shows that (i) the restrictor can be smaller than the entire VP and is not necessarily identical to the surface complement of ‘only’; (ii) in the case of association with a head the restrictor comprises an XP containing the head; and (iii) in cases of association into an island, the restrictor comprises the entire island. Generalizations (i)–(iii) can be captured straightforwardly by a movement approach but are incompatible with an in situ analysis. Contextual domain- restriction of the kind used in in situ approaches accounts for the appropriate semantics in cases where the semantic focus is properly contained in the syntactic restrictor of ‘only’. (shrink)

Philosophers of language distinguish among the lexical or linguistic meaning of the sentence uttered, what is said by an utterance of the sentence, and speaker's meaning, or what is conveyed by the speaker to her audience. In most views, what is said is the semantic or truth-conditional content of the utterance, and is irreducible either to the linguistic meaning or to the speaker's meaning. I will show that those views account badly for people's intuitions on what is said. I will (...) also argue that no distinguished level of what is said is required, and that the notion of linguistic meaning is the best placed to play the role of what is said. This relies on two points. First, our intuitions on what is said cannot be detached from the ways in which we talk about what is said, and from the semantics of speech reports and indirect discourse in general. Second, besides what is said, there is an equally important notion of what what-is-said is said about, or that about which the speaker is talking. These are, then, the three main ingredients needed for the theory of what is said: linguistic meaning, what is talked about, and a semantic account of reported speech. (shrink)

It has been long known (Perry in Philos Rev 86: 474–497, 1977 ; Noûs 13: 3–21, 1979 , Lewis in Philos Rev 88: 513–543 1981 ) that de se attitudes, such as beliefs and desires that one has about oneself , call for a special treatment in theories of attitudinal content. The aim of this paper is to raise similar concerns for theories of asserted content. The received view, inherited from Kaplan ( 1989 ), has it that if Alma says (...) “I am hungry,” the asserted content, or what is said , is the proposition that Alma is hungry (at a given time). I argue that the received view has difficulties handling de se assertion, i.e., contents that one expresses using the first person pronoun, to assert something about oneself. I start from the observation that when two speakers say “I am hungry,” one may truly report them as having said the same thing. It has often been held that the possibility of such reports comes from the fact that the two speakers are, after all, uttering the same words, and are in this sense “saying the same thing”. I argue that this approach fails, and that it is neither necessary nor sufficient to use the same words, or words endowed with the same meaning, in order to be truly reported as same-saying. I also argue that reports of same-saying in the case of de se assertion differ significantly from such reports in the case of two speakers merely implicating the same thing. (shrink)

Four different kinds of grammars that can define crossing dependencies in human language are compared here: (i) context sensitive rewrite grammars with rules that depend on context, (ii) matching grammars with constraints that filter the generative structure of the language, (iii) copying grammars which can copy structures of unbounded size, and (iv) generating grammars in which crossing dependencies are generated from a finite lexical basis. Context sensitive rewrite grammars are syntactically, semantically and computationally unattractive. Generating grammars have a collection of (...) nice properties that ensure they define only “mildly context sensitive” languages, and Joshi has proposed that human languages have those properties too. But for certain distinctive kinds of crossing dependencies in human languages, copying or matching analyses predominate. Some results relevant to the viability of mildly context sensitive analyses and some open questions are reviewed. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the thesis that alleffects of extra-linguistic context on thetruth-conditions of an assertion are traceable toelements in the actual syntactic structure of thesentence uttered. In the first section, I develop thethesis in detail, and discuss its implications for therelation between semantics and pragmatics. The nexttwo sections are devoted to apparent counterexamples.In the second section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of true non-sentential assertions.In the third section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of what (...) John Perry has called`unarticulated constituents''. I conclude by drawingsome consequences of my arguments for appeals tocontext-dependence in the resolution of problems inepistemology and philosophical logic. (shrink)

Contextualism treats ‘knows’ as an indexical that denotes different epistemic properties in different contexts. Contrastivism treats ‘knows’ as denoting a ternary relation with a slot for a contrast proposition. I will argue that contrastivism resolves the main philosophical problems of contextualism, by employing a better linguistic model. Contextualist insights are best understood by contrastivist theory.

Structured propositions are often invoked to explain why intensionally equivalent sentences do not substitute salva veritate into attitude ascriptions. As the semantics is standardly developed—for example, in Salmon, Soames :47–87, 1987) and King :516–535, 1995), the semantic value of a complex expression is an ordered complex consisting of the semantic values of its components. Such views, however, trivialize semantic composition since they do not allow for independent constraints on the meaning of complexes. Trivializing semantic composition risks “trivializing semantics” Semantics versus (...) pragmatics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005). Yet, proponents of structured propositions suggest a route to reimpose substantive compositionality. While the mapping from a sentence to the structured proposition it expresses is trivially compositional, there is a non-trivial mapping from the structured proposition to its truth-value. This non-trivial level of semantic composition allows the meanings assigned to complex expressions to impose substantive constraints on the meanings of the simple ones. I first articulate the basic desiderata: an account of structured propositions capable of explaining attitude attributions and of delivering a non-trivially compositional semantics. I then show that the two-stage semantics proposed by standard proponents of structured propositions does not satisfy these joint goals. (shrink)

Semantics in the Montagovian tradition combines two basic tenets. One tenet is that the semantic value of a sentence is an intension, a function from points of evaluations into truth-values. The other tenet is that the semantic value of a composite expression is the result of applying the function denoted by one component to arguments denoted by the other components. Many philosophers object to intensional semantics on the grounds that intensionally equivalent sentences do not substitute salva veritate into attitude ascriptions. (...) They propose instead that the semantic values of sentences must be structured propositions. In rejecting intensional semantics, philosophers who endorse structured propositions also usually reject functional compositionality, undermining both tenets of the Montagovian programme. I defend a semantic theory that incorporates both structured propositions and functional compositionality. I argue that this semantic theory can preserve many explanatory benefits of Montague semantics. Finally, I show how treating composition functional application can resolve core problems internal to a theory of structured propositions. (shrink)

Despite the attention that various forms of ellipsis have received inthe literature, the conditions under which a representation of anutterance may serve as a suitable referent for interpreting subsequentelliptical forms remain poorly understood. This fundamental questionremains as a point of contention, particularly because there are datato support various conflicting approaches that attempt to characterizethese conditions within a single module of language processing. Weshow a previously unnoticed pattern in VP-ellipsis data with respectto the type of coherence relation extant between the antecedentand (...) elided clauses. This pattern is explained by an account of howellipsis resolution processes interact with the inference processesunderlying the establishment of these relations. The analysis alsoexplains a similar yet distinct pattern in gapping constructions whichare not accounted for by purely syntactic approaches. Finally, wediscuss event reference and compare the resulting account to thedichotomy of types of anaphora posited by HanSag. (shrink)

Humans are complex systems, ‘macro-entities’, whose existence, behaviour and consciousness stem out of the configurations of physical entities on the micro-level of the physical world. But an explanation of what humans do and think cannot be found through ‘tracking us back’, so to speak, to micro-particles. So, in explaining human behaviour, including linguistic behaviour on which this paper focuses, emergentism opens up a powerful opportunity to explain what it is exactly that emerged on that level, bearing in mind the end (...) product in the form of the intra- and inter-cultural diversity. Currently there is a gap in emergentism research. On one hand, there are discussions in philosophy of the emergent human reality; on the other, there are discussions of social, cultural, or individual variation of these emergent aspects of humanity in the fields of anthropology, sociology, linguistics or psychology. What I do in this paper is look for a way to ‘trace’ some such diversified emergents from what is universal about their ‘coming to being’, all the way through to their diversification. My chosen emergent is human time, my domain of inquiry is natural-language discourse, and the drive behind this project is to understand the link between ‘real’ time of spacetime on the micro-level from which we emerged and the human time devised by us, paying close attention to the overwhelming diversity in which temporal reference is expressed in human languages. The main question is, where does this diversity fit in? Does understanding of this diversity, as well as of what lurks under the surface of this diversity, aid the emergentism story? My contribution to this volume on ‘the nature of structure and the structure of nature’ thus takes the following take on the title. The structure of human communication is at the same time uniform, universal, and relative to culture, in that it is emergent as a human characteristic, and as such compatible with the micro-level correlates in some essential ways, but also free to fly in different directions that are specific to societies and cultures. I explore here the grey area between the micro-level and the linguistic reflections of time—the middle ground that is emergent itself but that tends to be by-passed by those who approach the question of human flowing time from either end: metaphysics and the philosophy of time on the one hand, and contrastive linguistics, anthropological linguistics and language documentation on the other. I illustrate the debate with examples from tensed and tenseless languages from different language families, entertaining the possibility of a conceptual universal pertaining to time as degrees of epistemic modality. Needless to say, putting the question in this way also sets out my (not unassailable) methodology. (shrink)

Various writers have proposed that the notion of a possible world is a functional concept, yet very little has been done to develop that proposal. This paper explores a particular functionalist account of possible worlds, according to which pluralities of possible worlds are the bases for structures which provide occupants for the roles which analyse our ordinary modal concepts. It argues that the resulting position meets some of the stringent constraints which philosophers have placed upon accounts of possible worlds, while (...) also trivializing the question what possible worlds are. The paper then discusses a range of problems facing the functionalist position. (shrink)

Broadly, the subject of this paper is the relation between logic and linguistics. More narrowly, it concentrates on formal semantics. The first part of the text discusses the topics and methods of formal semantics, and the second part the history of formal semantics. Formal semantic analysis has not been widely known and applied in our research community, and formal methods have been applied extremely rarely in linguistic analyses. This is why it is useful to point out the significant achievements of (...) formal semantics. This inspiring interdisciplinary field of research has been successfully connecting research in linguistics, logic and philosophy since the early 1970s. (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)