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  1. The Logical and Philosophical Foundations for the Possibility of True Contradictions.Ben Martin - 2014 - Dissertation, University College London
    The view that contradictions cannot be true has been part of accepted philosophical theory since at least the time of Aristotle. In this regard, it is almost unique in the history of philosophy. Only in the last forty years has the view been systematically challenged with the advent of dialetheism. Since Graham Priest introduced dialetheism as a solution to certain self-referential paradoxes, the possibility of true contradictions has been a live issue in the philosophy of logic. Yet, despite the arguments (...)
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  • Disarming Context Dependence. A Formal Inquiry into Indexicalism and Truth-Conditional Pragmatics.Stellan Petersson - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Gothenburg
    In the debate about semantic context dependence, various truth-conditional frameworks have been proposed. Indexicalism, associated with e.g. Jason Stanley, accounts for contextual effects on truth conditions in terms of a rich covert syntax. Truth-conditional pragmatics, associated with e.g. François Recanati, does not locate the mechanisms for context dependence in the syntactic structure but provides a more complex semantics. In this dissertation, the hypothesis that indexicalism and truth-conditional pragmatics are empirically equivalent is explored. The conclusion that the hypothesis is correct emerges, (...)
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  • (1 other version)Mixed computation: grammar up and down the Chomsky Hierarchy.Diego Gabriel Krivochen - 2021 - Evolutionary Linguistic Theory 2 (3):215-244.
    Proof-theoretic models of grammar are based on the view that an explicit characterization of a language comes in the form of the recursive enumeration of strings in that language. That recur-sive enumeration is carried out by a procedure which strongly generates a set of structural de-scriptions Σ and weakly generates a set of strings S; a grammar is thus a function that pairs an element of Σ with elements of S. Structural descriptions are obtained by means of Context-Free phrase structure (...)
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  • Semantics without semantic content.Daniel W. Harris - 2020 - Mind and Language 37 (3):304-328.
    I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. This system’s role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence’s semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say. I show how to translate this thesis into a (...)
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  • Linguistics and the explanatory economy.Gabe Dupre - 2019 - Synthese 199 (Suppl 1):177-219.
    I present a novel, collaborative, methodology for linguistics: what I call the ‘explanatory economy’. According to this picture, multiple models/theories are evaluated based on the extent to which they complement one another with respect to data coverage. I show how this model can resolve a long-standing worry about the methodology of generative linguistics: that by creating too much distance between data and theory, the empirical credentials of this research program are tarnished. I provide justifications of such methodologically central distinctions as (...)
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  • Embedded Attitudes.Kyle Blumberg & Ben Holguín - 2019 - Journal of Semantics 36 (3):377-406.
    This paper presents a puzzle involving embedded attitude reports. We resolve the puzzle by arguing that attitude verbs take restricted readings: in some environments the denotation of attitude verbs can be restricted by a given proposition. For example, when these verbs are embedded in the consequent of a conditional, they can be restricted by the proposition expressed by the conditional’s antecedent. We formulate and motivate two conditions on the availability of verb restrictions: a constraint that ties the content of restrictions (...)
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  • Semantics with Assignment Variables.Alex Silk - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    This book combines insights from philosophy and linguistics to develop a novel framework for theorizing about linguistic meaning and the role of context in interpretation. A key innovation is to introduce explicit representations of context — assignment variables — in the syntax and semantics of natural language. The proposed theory systematizes a spectrum of “shifting” phenomena in which the context relevant for interpreting certain expressions depends on features of the linguistic environment. Central applications include local and nonlocal contextual dependencies with (...)
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  • Logical Form.Kirk Ludwig - 2011 - In Gillian Russell & Delia Graff Fara (eds.), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 29-41.
    This chapter reviews some of the history of discussions of logical form and offers a truth-theoretic account that traces back to Donald Davidson.
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  • The breadth of semantics: reply to critics.Ernie Lepore & Matthew Stone - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (2):195-206.
    In our 2015 book Imagination and Convention, we explore the scope and limits of linguistic knowledge in semantics and pragmatics for natural language. We draw heavily on the notion of coordination from David Lewis' book on conventions. To the extent that the account we develop is right, general principles like Grice's cooperative principle and the maxims of conversation have little to say about about interpretation. Three commentators—Anne Bezuidenhout, Laurence Horn, and Zoltan Gendler Szabo—discuss and evaluate our program in three essays (...)
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  • (1 other version)Quantification and Contributing Objects to Thoughts.Michael Glanzberg - 2008 - Philosophical Perspectives 22 (1):207-231.
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  • The comparative and degree pluralities.Jakub Dotlačil & Rick Nouwen - 2016 - Natural Language Semantics 24 (1):45-78.
    Quantifiers in phrasal and clausal comparatives often seem to take distributive scope in the matrix clause: for instance, the sentence John is taller than every girl is is true iff for every girl it holds that John is taller than that girl. Broadly speaking, two approaches exist that derive this reading without postulating the wide scope of the quantifier: the negation analysis and the interval analysis of than-clauses. We propose a modification of the interval analysis in which than-clauses are not (...)
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  • Against ellipsis: arguments for the direct licensing of ‘noncanonical’ coordinations.Yusuke Kubota & Robert Levine - 2015 - Linguistics and Philosophy 38 (6):521-576.
    Categorial grammar is well-known for its elegant analysis of coordination enabled by the flexible notion of constituency it entertains. However, to date, no systematic study exists that examines whether this analysis has any obvious empirical advantage over alternative analyses of nonconstituent coordination available in phrase structure-based theories of syntax. This paper attempts precisely such a comparison. We compare the direct constituent coordination analysis of non-canonical coordinations in categorial grammar with an ellipsis-based analysis of the same phenomena in the recent HPSG (...)
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  • Against the Russellian open future.Anders J. Schoubye & Brian Rabern - 2017 - Mind 126 (504): 1217–1237.
    Todd (2016) proposes an analysis of future-directed sentences, in particular sentences of the form 'will(φ)', that is based on the classic Russellian analysis of definite descriptions. Todd's analysis is supposed to vindicate the claim that the future is metaphysically open while retaining a simple Ockhamist semantics of future contingents and the principles of classical logic, i.e. bivalence and the law of excluded middle. Consequently, an open futurist can straightforwardly retain classical logic without appeal to supervaluations, determinacy operators, or any further (...)
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  • The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology.Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.) - 2016 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...)
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  • The interaction of compositional semantics and event semantics.Lucas Champollion - 2015 - Linguistics and Philosophy 38 (1):31-66.
    Davidsonian event semantics is often taken to form an unhappy marriage with compositional semantics. For example, it has been claimed to be problematic for semantic accounts of quantification Proceedings of the 16th Amsterdam Colloquium, 2007), for classical accounts of negation Semantics and contextual expression, 1989), and for intersective accounts of verbal coordination. This paper shows that none of this is the case, once we abandon the idea that the event variable is bound at sentence level, and assume instead that verbs (...)
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  • Correct language use: how syntactic and normative constraints converge.Florian Demont - unknown
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  • The Bounds of Logic: A Generalized Viewpoint.Gila Sher - 1991 - MIT Press.
    The Bounds of Logic presents a new philosophical theory of the scope and nature of logic based on critical analysis of the principles underlying modern Tarskian logic and inspired by mathematical and linguistic development. Extracting central philosophical ideas from Tarski’s early work in semantics, Sher questions whether these are fully realized by the standard first-order system. The answer lays the foundation for a new, broader conception of logic. By generally characterizing logical terms, Sher establishes a fundamental result in semantics. Her (...)
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  • P-model Alternative to the T-model.Mark D. Roberts - 2004 - Web Journal of Formal, Computational and Logical Linguistics 5:1-18.
    Standard linguistic analysis of syntax uses the T-model. This model requires the ordering: D-structure > S-structure > LF, where D-structure is the sentences deep structure, S-structure is its surface structure, and LF is its logical form. Between each of these representations there is movement which alters the order of the constituent words; movement is achieved using the principles and parameters of syntactic theory. Psychological analysis of sentence production is usually either serial or connectionist. Psychological serial models do not accommodate the (...)
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  • Constructing Concessive Conditionals: In Case of Japanese.Ai Matsui - 2009 - In Arndt Riester & Torgrim Solstad (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn Und Bedeutung 13.
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  • Propositions and compositionality.Juhani Yli-Vakkuri - 2013 - Philosophical Perspectives 27 (1):526-563.
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  • Ghosts, Murderers, and the Semantics of Descriptions.Anders Johan Schoubye - 2011 - Noûs 47 (3):496-533.
    It is widely agreed that sentences containing a non-denoting description embedded in the scope of a propositional attitude verb have true de dicto interpretations, and Russell's (1905) analysis of definite descriptions is often praised for its simple analysis of such cases, cf. e.g. Neale (1990). However, several people, incl. Elbourne (2005, 2009), Heim (1991), and Kripke (2005), have contested this by arguing that Russell's analysis yields incorrect predictions in non-doxastic attitude contexts. Heim and Elbourne have subsequently argued that once certain (...)
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  • Ways of Scope Taking.Anna Szabolcsi (ed.) - 1997 - Kluwer Academic Publishers.
    Ways of Scope Taking is concerned with syntactic, semantic and computational aspects of scope. Its starting point is the well-known but often neglected fact that different types of quantifiers interact differently with each other and other operators. The theoretical examination of significant bodies of data, both old and novel, leads to two central claims. (1) Scope is a by-product of a set of distinct Logical Form processes; each quantifier participates in those that suit its particular features. (2) Scope interaction is (...)
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  • The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics.Peter Ludlow - 2011 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Peter Ludlow presents the first book on the philosophy of generative linguistics, including both Chomsky's government and binding theory and his minimalist ...
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  • Certain Verbs Are Syntactically Explicit Quantifiers.Anna Szabolcsi - 2011 - The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 6:5.
    Quantification over individuals, times, and worlds can in principle be made explicit in the syntax of the object language, or left to the semantics and spelled out in the meta-language. The traditional view is that quantification over individuals is syntactically explicit, whereas quantification over times and worlds is not. But a growing body of literature proposes a uniform treatment. This paper examines the scopal interaction of aspectual raising verbs (begin), modals (can), and intensional raising verbs (threaten) with quantificational subjects in (...)
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  • Type-Logical Semantics.Reinhard Muskens - 2011 - Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online.
    Type-logical semantics studies linguistic meaning with the help of the theory of types. The latter originated with Russell as an answer to the paradoxes, but has the additional virtue that it is very close to ordinary language. In fact, type theory is so much more similar to language than predicate logic is, that adopting it as a vehicle of representation can overcome the mismatches between grammatical form and predicate logical form that were observed by Frege and Russell. The grammatical forms (...)
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  • What VP ellipsis can do, and what it can't, but not why.Kyle Johnson - 2001 - In Mark Baltin & Chris Collins (eds.), The Handbook of Contemporary Syntactic Theory. Blackwell. pp. 439--479.
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  • Against LF Pied-Piping.Arnim von Stechow - 1996 - Natural Language Semantics 4 (1):57-110.
    The arguments for LF Pied-Piping given by Nishigauchi and others are represented. It is shown that Nishigauchi's semantics for pied-piped phrases gives the wrong meaning for interrogatives. We argue that none of the arguments for LF Pied-Piping is tenable and most of the arguments against the traditional approach (unbounded wh-movement at LF) do not stand up to scrutiny. However, some data turn out to be problematic for the traditional account. The alternative considered here involves pied-piping at an intermediate level between (...)
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  • Concepts, meanings and truth: First nature, second nature and hard work.Paul M. Pietroski - 2010 - Mind and Language 25 (3):247-278.
    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 (...)
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  • Computational Complexity of Polyadic Lifts of Generalized Quantifiers in Natural Language.Jakub Szymanik - 2010 - Linguistics and Philosophy 33 (3):215-250.
    We study the computational complexity of polyadic quantifiers in natural language. This type of quantification is widely used in formal semantics to model the meaning of multi-quantifier sentences. First, we show that the standard constructions that turn simple determiners into complex quantifiers, namely Boolean operations, iteration, cumulation, and resumption, are tractable. Then, we provide an insight into branching operation yielding intractable natural language multi-quantifier expressions. Next, we focus on a linguistic case study. We use computational complexity results to investigate semantic (...)
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  • Free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures* MIT,.Danny Fox - manuscript
    This paper will be concerned with the conjunctive interpretation of a family of disjunctive constructions. The relevant conjunctive interpretation, sometimes referred to as a “free choice effect,” (FC) is attested when a disjunctive sentence is embedded under an existential modal operator. I will provide evidence that the relevant generalization extends (with some caveats) to all constructions in which a disjunctive sentence appears under the scope of an existential quantifier, as well as to seemingly unrelated constructions in which conjunction appears under (...)
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  • From hell to polarity: Aggressively Non-D-Linked wh-phrases as polarity items.Anastasia Giannakidou & Marcel den Dikken - manuscript
    Pesetsky’s (1987) ‘‘aggressively non-D-linked’’ wh-phrases (like who the hell; hereinafter, wh-the-hell phrases) exhibit a variety of syntactic and semantic peculiarities, including the fact that they cannot occur in situ and do not support nonecho readings when occurring in root multiple questions. While these are familiar from the literature (albeit less than fully understood), our focus will be on a previously unnoted property of wh-the-hell phrases: the fact that their distribution (in single wh-questions) matches that of polarity items (PIs). We lay (...)
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  • N-words and negative concord.Anastasia Giannakidou - manuscript
    In the Linguistics Companion, Blackwell, Oxford. Available in on-line encyclopedia.
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  • Descriptions as predicates.Delia Graff Fara - 2001 - Philosophical Studies 102 (1):1-42.
    Although Strawson’s main aim in “On Referring” was to argue that definite descriptions can be used referentially – that is, “to mention or refer to some individual person or single object . . . , in the course of doing what we should normally describe as making a statement about that person [or] object” (1950, p. 320) – he denied that definite descriptions are always used referentially. The description in ‘Napoleon was the greatest French soldier’ is not used referentially, says (...)
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  • From contextualism to contrastivism.Jonathan Schaffer - 2004 - Philosophical Studies 119 (1-2):73-104.
    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.
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  • Scope and binding.Anna Szabolcsi - 2011 - In von Heusinger, Maienborn & Portner (eds.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Vol. 2. de Gruyter Mouton.
    The first part of this article (Sections 1–5) focuses on the classical notions of scope and binding and their formal foundations. It argues that once their semantic core is properly understood, it can be implemented in various different ways: with or without movement, with or without variables. The second part (Sections 6–12) takes up the empirical issues that have redrawn the map in the past two decades. It turns out that scope is not a primitive. Existential scope and distributive scope (...)
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  • Structured propositions and sentence structure.Jeffrey King - 1996 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 25 (5):495 - 521.
    It is argued that taken together, two widely held claims ((i) sentences express structured propositions whose structures are functions of the structures of sentences expressing them; and (ii) sentences have underlying structures that are the input to semantic interpretation) suggest a simple, plausible theory of propositional structure. According to this theory, the structures of propositions are the same as the structures of the syntactic inputs to semantics they are expressed by. The theory is defended against a variety of objections.
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  • Bound VPs that need to be.Isabelle Haik - 1987 - Linguistics and Philosophy 10 (4):503 - 530.
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  • Quantificational arguments in temporal adjunct clauses.Ron Artstein - 2005 - Linguistics and Philosophy 28 (5):541 - 597.
    Quantificational arguments can take scope outside of temporal adjunct clauses, in an apparent violation of locality restrictions: the sentence few secretaries cried after each executive resigned allows the quantificational NP each executive to take scope above few secretaries. I show how this scope relation is the result of local operations: the adjunct clause is a temporal generalized quantifier which takes scope over the main clause (Pratt and Francez, Linguistic and Philosophy 24(2), 187–222. [2001]), and within the adjunct clause, the quantificational (...)
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  • Merge and Features: The Engine of Syntax 1.Peter Svenonius - 2021 - In Nicholas Allott, Terje Lohndal & Georges Rey (eds.), A Companion to Chomsky. Wiley. pp. 140–157.
    Since the inception of the Minimalist Program, Noam Chomsky has increasingly pushed the boundaries of a minimalist conception of grammar, one that pares the mechanisms specific to language down to the bare bones. In addition to the structure‐building operation of Merge, grammar involves some mechanism for feature interaction. Chomsky has explored several different varieties of a mechanism AGREE responsible for these kinds of feature interactions, for example feature matching, feature valuation, and feature movement, as discussed in this chapter. The Minimalist (...)
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  • The scope of alternatives: indefiniteness and islands.Simon Charlow - 2020 - Linguistics and Philosophy 43 (4):427-472.
    I argue that alternative-denoting expressions interact with their semantic context by taking scope. With an empirical focus on indefinites in English, I show how this approach improves on standard alternative-semantic architectures that use point-wise composition to subvert islands, as well as on in situ approaches to indefinites more generally. Unlike grammars based on point-wise composition, scope-based alternative management is thoroughly categorematic, doesn’t under-generate readings when multiple sources of alternatives occur on an island, and is compatible with standard treatments of binding. (...)
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  • Minimal Semantic Instructions.Paul M. Pietroski - 2011 - In Boeckx Cedric (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Minimalism. Oxford University Press. pp. 472-498.
    Chomsky’s (1995, 2000a) Minimalist Program (MP) invites a perspective on semantics that is distinctive and attractive. In section one, I discuss a general idea that many theorists should find congenial: the spoken or signed languages that human children naturally acquire and use— henceforth, human languages—are biologically implemented procedures that generate expressions, whose meanings are recursively combinable instructions to build concepts that reflect a minimal interface between the Human Faculty of Language (HFL) and other cognitive systems. In sections two and three, (...)
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  • Logical Quantifiers.Gila Sher - 2011 - In Gillian Russell & Delia Graff Fara (eds.), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 579-595.
    This chapter offers a logical, linguistic, and philosophical account of modern quantification theory. Contrasting the standard approach to quantifiers (according to which logical quantifiers are defined by enumeration) with the generalized approach (according to which quantifiers are defined systematically), the chapter begins with a brief history of standard quantifier theory and identifies some of its logical, linguistic, and philosophical strengths and weaknesses. It then proceeds to a brief history of generalized quantifier theory and explains how it overcomes the weaknesses of (...)
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  • Indeterminate Phrase Quantification in Japanese.Junko Shimoyama - 2006 - Natural Language Semantics 14 (2):139-173.
    This paper examines the question of how so-called indeterminate phrases in Japanese (Kuroda 1965) associate with relevant particles higher in the structure. In the universal construction in Japanese, the restrictor (provided by an indeterminate phrase) sometimes appears to be separate from the universal particle mo. It is proposed that quantification at a distance is only apparent, and that the restriction is in fact provided locally by the sister constituent of mo as a whole. The proposal leads us to a straightforward (...)
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  • Recent work on propositions.Peter Hanks - 2009 - Philosophy Compass 4 (3):469-486.
    Propositions, the abstract, truth-bearing contents of sentences and beliefs, continue to be the focus of healthy debates in philosophy of language and metaphysics. This article is a critical survey of work on propositions since the mid-90s, with an emphasis on newer work from the past decade. Topics to be covered include a substitution puzzle about propositional designators, two recent arguments against propositions, and two new theories about the nature of propositions.
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  • The disunity of truth.Josh Dever - 2008 - In Robert Stainton & Christopher Viger (eds.), Compositionality, Context, and Semantic Values: Essays in Honor of Ernie Lepore. Springer. pp. 174-191.
    §§3-4 of the Begriffsschrift present Frege’s objections to a dominant if murky nineteenth-century semantic picture. I sketch a minimalist variant of the pre-Fregean picture which escapes Frege’s criticisms by positing a thin notion of semantic content which then interacts with a multiplicity of kinds of truth to account for phenomena such as modality. After exploring several ways in which we can understand the existence of multiple truth properties, I discuss the roles of pointwise and setwise truth properties in modal logic. (...)
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  • Complex demonstratives and their singular contents.David Braun - 2008 - Linguistics and Philosophy 31 (1):57-99.
    This paper presents a semantic and pragmatic theory of complex demonstratives. According to this theory, the semantic content of a complex demonstrative, in a context, is simply an object, and the semantic content of a sentence that contains a complex demonstrative, in a context, is a singular proposition. This theory is defended from various objections to direct reference theories of complex demonstratives, including King's objection from quantification into complex demonstratives.
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  • (1 other version)The binding argument and pragmatic enrichment, or, why philosophers care even more than weathermen about 'raining'.Adam Sennet - 2007 - Philosophy Compass 3 (1):135-157.
    What is the proper way to draw the semantics-pragmatics distinction, and is what is said by a speaker ever enriched by pragmatics? An influential but controversial answer to the latter question is that the inputs to semantic interpretation contains representations of every contribution from context that is relevant to determining what is said, and that pragmatics never enriches the output of semantic interpretation. The proposal is bolstered by a controversial argument from syntactic binding designed to detect hidden syntactic structure. The (...)
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  • Interpreting concatenation and concatenates.Paul M. Pietroski - 2006 - Philosophical Issues 16 (1):221–245.
    This paper presents a slightly modified version of the compositional semantics proposed in Events and Semantic Architecture (OUP 2005). Some readers may find this shorter version, which ignores issues about vagueness and causal constructions, easier to digest. The emphasis is on the treatments of plurality and quantification, and I assume at least some familiarity with more standard approaches.
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  • Lexical selection and quantificational variability in embedded interrogatives.Utpal Lahiri - 2000 - Linguistics and Philosophy 23 (4):325-389.
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  • Towards a variable-free semantics.Pauline Jacobson - 1999 - Linguistics and Philosophy 22 (2):117-185.
    The Montagovian hypothesis of direct model-theoretic interpretation of syntactic surface structures is supported by an account of the semantics of binding that makes no use of variables, syntactic indices, or assignment functions & shows that the interpretation of a large portion of so-called variable-binding phenomena can dispense with the level of logical form without incurring equivalent complexity elsewhere in the system. Variable-free semantics hypothesizes local interpretation of each surface constituent; binding is formalized as a type-shifting operation on expressions that denote (...)
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