The heyday of discussions initiated by Searle's claim that computers have syntax, but no semantics has now past, yet philosophers and scientists still tend to frame their views on artificial intelligence in terms of syntax and semantics. In this paper I do not intend to take part in these discussions; my aim is more fundamental, viz. to ask what claims about syntax and semantics in this context can mean in the first place. And I argue that their sense is so (...) unclear that that their ability to act as markers within any disputes on artificial intelligence is severely compromised; and hence that their employment brings us nothing more than an illusion of explanation. (shrink)

Abstract Impossible fictions have lessons to teach us about linguistic representation, about mental content and concepts, and about uses of conceivability in epistemology. An adequate theory of impossible fictions may require theories of meaning that can distinguish between different impossibilities; a theory of conceptual truth that allows us to make useful sense of a variety of conceptual falsehoods; and a theory of our understanding of necessity and possibility that permits impossibilities to be conceived. After discussing these questions, strategies for resisting (...) the picture of impossible fictions presented here and in Part I are discussed. Perhaps apparently impossible fictions describe possibilities after all; or perhaps impossible fictions are all trivial; or perhaps some apparently intelligible impossible fictions are unintelligible after all. (shrink)

Abstract The purpose of this paper is twofold: (i) we will argue that formal semantics might have faltered due to its failure in distinguishing between two fundamentally very different types of concepts, namely ontological concepts, that should be types in a strongly-typed ontology, and logical concepts, that are predicates corresponding to properties of, and relations between, objects of various ontological types; and (ii) we show that accounting for these differences amounts to a new formal semantics; one that integrates lexical and (...) compositional semantics in one coherent framework and one where formal semantics is embedded with a strongly typed ontology; an ontology that reflects our commonsense knowledge of the world and the way we talk about it in ordinary language. We will show how in such a framework a number of challenges in the semantics of natural language are adequately and systematically treated. (shrink)

Two kinds of individuals are distinguished: abstract and concrete. Whereas abstract individuals belong to our conceptual sphere, concrete individuals (i.e. particulars) individuate the world of matter. A subject investigating the external world projects abstract individuals onto concrete ones. The proposal offers a solution to various metaphysical and epistemological puzzles concerned with individuals, e.g., the Ship of Theseus, the Polish Logician, problems with reidentification, or proper names.

This paper contains an argument to the effect that possible worlds semantics renders semantic knowledge impossible, no matter what ontological interpretation is given to possible worlds. The essential contention made is that possible worlds semantic knowledge is unsafe and this is shown by a parallel with the preface paradox.

In truth theory one aims at general formal laws governing the attribution of truth to statements. Gupta’s and Belnap’s revision-theoretic approach provides various well-motivated theories of truth, in particular T* and T#, which tame the Liar and related paradoxes without a Tarskian hierarchy of languages. In property theory, one similarly aims at general formal laws governing the predication of properties. To avoid Russell’s paradox in this area a recourse to type theory is still popular, as testified by recent work in (...) formal metaphysics by Williamson and Hale. There is a contingent Liar that has been taken to be a problem for type theory. But this is because this Liar has been presented without an explicit recourse to a truth predicate. Thus, type theory could avoid this paradox by incorporating such a predicate and accepting an appropriate theory of truth. There is however a contingent paradox of predication that more clearly undermines the viability of type theory. It is then suggested that a type-free property theory is a better option. One can pursue it, by generalizing the revision-theoretic approach to predication, as it has been done by Orilia with his system P*, based on T*. Although Gupta and Belnap do not explicitly declare a preference for T# over T*, they show that the latter has some advantages, such as the recovery of intuitively acceptable principles concerning truth and a better reconstruction of informal arguments involving this notion. A type-free system based on T# rather than T* extends these advantages to predication and thus fares better than P* in the intended applications of property theory. (shrink)

Esta enciclopédia abrange, de uma forma introdutória mas desejavelmente rigorosa, uma diversidade de conceitos, temas, problemas, argumentos e teorias localizados numa área relativamente recente de estudos, os quais tem sido habitual qualificar como «estudos lógico-filosóficos». De uma forma apropriadamente genérica, e apesar de o território teórico abrangido ser extenso e de contornos por vezes difusos, podemos dizer que na área se investiga um conjunto de questões fundamentais acerca da natureza da linguagem, da mente, da cognição e do raciocínio humanos, bem (...) como questões acerca das conexões destes com a realidade não mental e extralinguística. A razão daquela qualificação é a seguinte: por um lado, a investigação em questão é qualificada como filosófica em virtude do elevado grau de generalidade e abstracção das questões examinadas (entre outras coisas); por outro, a investigação é qualificada como lógica em virtude de ser uma investigação logicamente disciplinada, no sentido de nela se fazer um uso intenso de conceitos, técnicas e métodos provenientes da disciplina de lógica. O agregado de tópicos que constitui a área de estudos lógico-filosóficos é já visível, pelo menos em parte, no Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus de Ludwig Wittgenstein, uma obra publicada em 1921. E uma boa maneira de ter uma ideia sinóptica do território disciplinar abrangido por esta enciclopédia, ou pelo menos de uma porção substancial dele, é extrair do Tractatus uma lista dos tópicos mais salientes aí discutidos; a lista incluirá certamente tópicos do seguinte género, muitos dos quais se podem encontrar ao longo desta enciclopédia: factos e estados de coisas; objectos; representação; crenças e estados mentais; pensamentos; a proposição; nomes próprios; valores de verdade e bivalência; quantificação; funções de verdade; verdade lógica; identidade; tautologia; o raciocínio matemático; a natureza da inferência; o cepticismo e o solipsismo; a indução; as constantes lógicas; a negação; a forma lógica; as leis da ciência; o número. (shrink)

Nonindexical Context-Dependence and the Interpretation as Abduction Approach Inclusive nonindexical context-dependence occurs when the preferred interpretation of an utterance implies its lexically-derived meaning. It is argued that the corresponding processes of free or lexically mandated enrichment can be modeled as abductive inference. A form of abduction is implemented in Simple Type Theory on the basis of a notion of plausibility, which is in turn regarded a preference relation over possible worlds. Since a preordering of doxastic alternatives taken for itself only (...) amounts to a relatively vacuous ad hoc model, it needs to be combined with a rational way of learning from new evidence. Lexicographic upgrade is implemented as an example of how an agent might revise his plausibility ordering in light of new evidence. Various examples are given how this apparatus may be used to model the contextual resolution of context-dependent or semantically incomplete utterances. The described form of abduction is limited and merely serves as a proof of concept, but the idea in general has good potential as one among many ways to build a bridge between semantics and pragmatics since inclusive context-dependence is ubiquitous. (shrink)

The book presents the case that cognitive science should turn its attention to developing theories of human cognition that cover the full range of human perceptual, cognitive, and action phenomena. Cognitive science has now produced a massive number of high-quality regularities with many microtheories that reveal important mechanisms. The need for integration is pressing and will continue to increase. Equally important, cognitive science now has the theoretical concepts and tools to support serious attempts at unified theories. The argument is made (...) entirely by presenting an exemplar unified theory of cognition both to show what a real unified theory would be like and to provide convincing evidence that such theories are feasible. The exemplar is SOAR, a cognitive architecture, which is realized as a software system. After a detailed discussion of the architecture and its properties, with its relation to the constraints on cognition in the real world and to existing ideas in cognitive science, SOAR is used as theory for a wide range of cognitive phenomena: immediate responses ; discrete motor skills ; memory and learning ; problem solving ; language ; and development. The treatments vary in depth and adequacy, but they clearly reveal a single, highly specific, operational theory that works over the entire range of human cognition, SOAR is presented as an exemplar unified theory, not as the sole candidate. Cognitive science is not ready yet for a single theory – there must be multiple attempts. But cognitive science must begin to work toward such unified theories. (shrink)

There is no doubt at all that the issue of determinism versus indeterminism was a central, dominating theme of Popper's thought. By his own account he saw his criticism of the thesis of determinism as crucial to his defence not only of the reality of human freedom, moral responsibility and creativity but also as equally fundamental to his account of human rationality and to his theory of the content and growth of science as an objective, rational and most importantly demonstrably (...) rational enterprise. Consequently a great deal of his writings discussing both the content and methodology of the natural and the social sciences alternately bear upon and presuppose his defence of indeterminism. (shrink)

My point in this paper is to focus on some details of Alfred Tarski’s writing that in my opinion have not been aptly represented — or aptly rejected — in Richard Montague’s grammar and to agree with those who share Tarski’s view that human language is something uncapturable. The paper consists of two parts, concerning 1) some attempts to formalize the non-declarative utterances, and 2) the limitations of T-scheme and of Montague grammar.

Three misrepresentations of informal and formal logic by two feminist writers are discussed. Andrea Nye's criticism that the semantics for formal logic abstracts from context is a misrepresentation of formal logic because Nye ignores the development of intensional logics. Second, Nye's criticism that informaIlogicians ignore the origins of arguments is a misrepresentation of fallacy theory. Prominent writers in the field specifiy numerous cases where the origins of an argument are relevant to its evaluation. Third, Valerie Plumwood's criticism that negation in (...) classical logic rests on an exclusivistic dualism that encourages the exclusion of women is shown to be false. (shrink)

Sometimes two expressions in a discourse can be about the same thing in a way that makes that very fact evident to the participants. Consider, for example, 'he' and 'John' in 'John went to the store and he bought some milk'. Let us call this 'de jure' coreference. Other times, coreference is 'de facto' as with 'Mark Twain' and 'Samuel Clemens' in a sincere use of 'Mark Twain is not Samuel Clemens'. Here, agents can understand the speech without knowing that (...) the names refer to the same person. After surveying many available linguistic and pragmatic tools (intentions to corefer, presuppositions, meanings, indexing, discourse referents, binding etc.) I conclude that we must posit a new semantic primitive to account for de jure coreference. (shrink)

It is commonly argued that natural language has the expressive power of quantifying over intensional entities, such as times, worlds, or situations. A standard way of modelling this assumes that there are unpronounced but syntactically represented variables of the corresponding type. Not all that much as has been said, however, about the exact syntactic location of these variables. Meanwhile, recent work has highlighted a number of problems that arise because the interpretive options for situation pronouns seem to be subject to (...) various restrictions. This paper is primarily concerned with situation pronouns inside of determiner phrases, arguing that they are introduced as arguments of (certain) determiners. Verbal predicates, on the other hand, are assumed to not combine with a situation pronoun. The various restrictions on their interpretation are shown to fall out from the semantic system that is developed based on that view. Further support for such an account comes from situation semantic analyses of donkey sentences as well as data on the temporal interpretation of nominal predicates. Its ability to account for this full range of data in a unified manner is shown to set it apart from previous proposals. The paper closes with an outlook on further extensions, including an account of quantifier domain restriction based on situation pronouns. (shrink)

The authors provide an object-theoretic analysis of two paradoxes in the theory of possible worlds and propositions stemming from Russell and Kaplan. After laying out the paradoxes, the authors provide a brief overview of object theory and point out how syntactic restrictions that prevent object-theoretic versions of the classical paradoxes are justified philosophically. The authors then trace the origins of the Russell paradox to a problematic application of set theory in the definition of worlds. Next the authors show that an (...) object-theoretic analysis of the Kaplan paradox reveals that there is no genuine paradox at all, as the central premise of the paradox is simply a logical falsehood and hence can be rejected on the strongest possible grounds—not only in object theory but for the very framework of propositional modal logic in which Kaplan frames his argument. The authors close by fending off a possible objection that object theory avoids the Russell paradox only by refusing to incorporate set theory and, hence, that the object-theoretic solution is only a consequence of the theory’s weakness. (shrink)

This book is conceived as an introductory text into the theory of syntactic and semantic information, and information flow.

Current theories of grammar handle both extraction and anaphorization by introducing variables into syntactic representations. Combinatory categorial grammar eliminates variables corresponding to gaps. Using the combinator W, the paper extends this approach to anaphors, which appear to act as overt bound variables. [Slightly extended version in Bartsch et al 1989.].

Formal semantics is an approach to SEMANTICS1, the study of meaning, with roots in logic, the philosophy of language, and linguistics, and since the 1980’s a core area of linguistic theory. Characteristics of formal semantics to be treated in this article include the following: Formal semanticists treat meaning as mind-independent (though abstract), contrasting with the view of meanings as concepts “in the head” (see I-LANGUAGE AND E-LANGUAGE and MEANING EXTERNALISM AND INTERNALISM); formal semanticists distinguish semantics from knowledge of semantics (Lewis (...) 1975, Cresswell 1978), which has consequences for the notion of semantic COMPETENCE. A central part of the meaning of a sentence on this approach is its TRUTH CONDITIONS, and most although not all formal semantics is model-theoretic, relating linguistic expressions to model-theoretically constructed semantic values cast in terms of truth, REFERENCE, and possible worlds. This sets formal semantics apart from approaches which view semantics as relating a sentence just to a representation on another linguistic “level” (LOGICAL FORM) or a representation in an innate LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT. The formal semanticist could accept such representations as an aspect of semantics but would insist on asking what the model-theoretic semantic interpretation of the given representationlanguage is (Lewis 1970). Formal semantics is centrally concerned with COMPOSITIONALITY at the SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE, how the meanings of larger constituents are built up from the meanings of their parts on the basis of their syntactic structure, and with the relation between compositional SENTENCE MEANING and meaning in discourse. (shrink)

I think that some of the arguments in this article are themselves flawed, or are based on an understanding of linguistics that is too narrowly focused on certain versions of generative grammar. For example, the argument that in computational applications purely statistical approaches are in general more successful than rule-based approaches has to be qualified: It holds, or may have hold, for certain applications like machine translation, but not for others, like the generation of text to answer queries to databases. (...) Furthermore, statistical methods have been integrated in certain linguistic theories themselves, like stochastic optimality theory (Boersma & Hayes 2001). The authors also claim that linguistics is not able to come up with leading questions for the cognitive and neurophysiological investigation of language processing. This statement is even more puzzling, as it is difficult to name serious research in psycholinguistics or in neurophysiological aspects of language processing that is not informed by theoretical notions rooted in linguistics, many of them derived from generative grammar. To cite just one case: Recursion has been proposed – perhaps unjustly so – as the single property that distinguishes human language processing from other animal communication systems; this has led to the identification of special brain regions and pathways of recursive language processing (cf. Friederici 2009). (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between Hume's Prinicple and Basic Law V, investigating the question whether we really do need to suppose that, already in Die Grundlagen, Frege intended that HP should be justified by its derivation from Law V.

This paper discusses certain problems arising within the treatment of the senses of functions in Alonzo Church's Logic of Sense and Denotation. Church understands such senses themselves to be "sense-functions," functions from sense to sense. However, the conditions he lays out under which a sense-function is to be regarded as a sense presenting another function as denotation allow for certain undesirable results given certain unusual or "deviant" sense-functions. Certain absurdities result, e.g., an argument can be found for equating any two (...) senses of the same type. An alternative treatment of the senses of functions is discussed, and is thought to do better justice to Frege's original theory. (shrink)

This essay presents a philosophical and computational theory of the representation of de re, de dicto, nested, and quasi-indexical belief reports expressed in natural language. The propositional Semantic Network Processing System (SNePS) is used for representing and reasoning about these reports. In particular, quasi-indicators (indexical expressions occurring in intentional contexts and representing uses of indicators by another speaker) pose problems for natural-language representation and reasoning systems, because--unlike pure indicators--they cannot be replaced by coreferential NPs without changing the meaning of the (...) embedding sentence. Therefore, the referent of the quasi-indicator must be represented in such a way that no invalid coreferential claims are entailed. The importance of quasi-indicators is discussed, and it is shown that all four of the above categories of belief reports can be handled by a single representational technique using belief spaces containing intensional entities. Inference rules and belief-revision techniques for the system are also examined. (shrink)

In the Twentieth Century, Logic and Philosophy of Language are two of the few areas of philosophy in which philosophers made indisputable progress. For example, even now many of the foremost living ethicists present their theories as somewhat more explicit versions of the ideas of Kant, Mill, or Aristotle. In contrast, it would be patently absurd for a contemporary philosopher of language or logician to think of herself as working in the shadow of any figure who died before the Twentieth (...) Century began. Advances in these disciplines make even the most unaccomplished of its practitioners vastly more sophisticated than Kant. There were previous periods in which the problems of language and logic were studied extensively (e.g. the medieval period). But from the perspective of the progress made in the last 120 years, previous work is at most a source of interesting data or occasional insight. All systematic theorizing about content that meets contemporary standards of rigor has been done subsequently. (shrink)

Language theorists have recently come to have an increasing appreciation for the fact that context contributes heavily in determining our interpretation of what is said. Indeed, it now seems clear that no complete understanding of a natural language is possible without some account of the way in which context affects our interpretation of discourse. In this paper, I will attempt to explore one facet of the language – context relationship, namely, the relation between conditionals and context. The first part of (...) the paper develops an account of truth for conditionals which allows them to depend on momentary features of the context in which they are uttered. In the second half of the paper, comparisons with other recent theories of the conditional will be considered. Particular attention will be given to the problem of whether the conditional really violates classical inferences such as Hypothetical Syllogism and Contraposition as has often been claimed in recent years. (shrink)

Portable Grammar Format (PGF) is a core language for type-theoretical grammars. It is the target language to which grammars written in the high-level formalism Grammatical Framework (GF) are compiled. Low-level and simple, PGF is easy to reason about, so that its language-theoretic properties can be established. It is also easy to write interpreters that perform parsing and generation with PGF grammars, and compilers converting PGF to other formats. This paper gives a concise description of PGF, covering syntax, semantics, and parser (...) generation. It also discusses the technique of embedded grammars, where language processing tasks defined by PGF grammars are integrated in larger systems. (shrink)

Does scientific psychology have a legitimate role to play in the philosophy of language? For example, is it methodologically permissible for philosophers of language to rely upon evidence from neurological development, experiments about processing, brain scans, clinical case histories, longitudinal studies, questionnaires, etc.? If so, why? These two questions are the focus of this survey. I address them in two stages. It may seem obvious that the science of psychology is relevant. I thus begin by introducing arguments against relevance, to (...) motivate the discussion. I will urge that these arguments ultimately fail, and that the appearance of relevance should be taken at face value. Next, I introduce positive arguments for relevance, with examples. To foreshadow the main conclusion, the methods and results of contemporary cognitive psychology are relevant because there are non-obvious connections, both constitutive and contingent, between language and human psychology. (shrink)

The semantics of noun phrases (NPs) is of crucial importance for both philosophy and linguistics. Throughout much of the history of the debate about the semantics of noun phrases there has been an implicit assumption about how they are to be understood. Basically, it is the assumption that NPs come only in two kinds. In this paper we would like to make that assumption explicit and discuss it and its status in the semantics of natural language. We will have a (...) look at how the assumption is to be understood more precisely, what its methodological status should be, whether it has been abandoned in recent work in semantics, and whether it should be abandoned in future work. To do all this, it’s best to start with some historical context. (shrink)

From the Editor’s Introduction: "The Internal Limitations of Human Understanding." We carry, unavoidably, the limits of our understanding with us. We are perpetually confined within the horizons of our conceptual structure. When this structure grows or expands, the breadth of our comprehensions enlarges, but we are forever barred from the wished-for glimpse beyond its boundaries, no matter how hard we try, no matter how much credence we invest in the substance of our learning and mist of speculation. -/- The limitations (...) in view here are not due to the mere finitude of our understanding of ourselves and of the world in which we live. They are limitations that come automatically and necessarily with any form of understanding. They are, as we shall see, part and parcel of any organization or ordering of data that we call information. -/- The consequences of these limitations are varied: As a result of them, hermeneutics cannot help but be hermetic; scientific theories of necessity are circumscribed by the boundaries of the ideas that define them; formal systems must choose between consistency and comprehensiveness; philosophical study, because it includes itself within its own proper subject matter, is forced to be reflexive in its self-enclosure. The fundamental dynamic shared by all forms of understanding testifies to an internal limitative keystone. (shrink)

Ambiguities in natural language can multiply so fast that no person or machine can be expected to process a text of even moderate length by enumerating all possible disambiguations. A sentence containing $n$ scope bearing elements which are freely permutable will have $n!$ readings, if there are no other, say lexical or syntactic, sources of ambiguity. A series of $m$ such sentences would lead to $(n!)^m$ possibilities. All in all the growth of possibilities will be so fast that generating readings (...) first and testing their acceptability afterwards will not be feasible. -/- This insight has led a series of researchers to adopt a level of representation at which ambiguities remain unresolved. The idea here is not to generate and test many possible interpretations but to first generate one `underspecified' representation which in a sense represents all its complete specifications and then use whatever information is available to further specify the result. -/- One central hypothesis in the paper will be that the relation between an underspecified representation and its full representations is not so much the relation between one structure and a set of other structures but is in fact the relation between a description (a set of logical sentences) and its models. (shrink)

The so-called New Theory of Reference (Marcus, Kripke etc.) is inspired by the insight that in modal and intensional contexts quantifiers presuppose nondescriptive unanalyzable identity criteria which do not reduce to any descriptive conditions. From this valid insight the New Theorists fallaciously move to the idea that free singular terms can exhibit a built-in direct reference and that there is even a special class of singular terms (proper names) necessarily exhibiting direct reference. This fallacious move has been encouraged by a (...) mistaken belief in the substitutional interpretation of quantifiers, by the myth of thede re reference, and a mistaken assimilation of direct reference to ostensive (perspectival) identification. Thede dicto vs.de re contrast does not involve direct reference, being merely a matter of rule-ordering (scope).The New Theorists' thesis of the necessity of identities of directly referred-to individuals is a consequence of an unmotivated and arbitrary restriction they tacitly impose on the identification of individuals. (shrink)

Situation semantics was developed as an alternative to possible worlds semantics. In situation semantics, linguistic expressions are evaluated with respect to partial, rather than complete, worlds. There is no consensus about what situations are, just as there is no consensus about what possible worlds or events are. According to some, situations are structured entities consisting of relations and individuals standing in those relations. According to others, situations are particulars. In spite of unresolved foundational issues, the partiality provided by situation semantics (...) has led to some genuinely new approaches to a variety of phenomena in natural language semantics. In the way of illustration, this article includes relatively detailed overviews of a few selected areas where situation semantics has been successful: implicit quantifier domain restrictions, donkey pronouns, and exhaustive interpretations. It moreover addresses the question of how Davidsonian event semantics can be embedded in a semantics based on situations. Other areas where a situation semantics perspective has led to progress include attitude ascriptions, questions, tense, aspect, nominalizations, implicit arguments, point of view, counterfactual conditionals, and discourse relations. (shrink)

Our purpose is to formulate a complete logic of propositions that takes into account the fact that propositions are both senses provided with truth values and contents of conceptual thoughts. In our formalization, propositions are more complex entities than simple functions from possible worlds into truth values. They have a structure of constituents (a content) in addition to truth conditions. The formalization is adequate for the purposes of the logic of speech acts. It imposes a stronger criterion of propositional identity (...) than strict equivalence. Two propositions P and Q are identical if and only if, for any illocutionary force F, it is not possible to perform with success a speech act of the form F(P) without also performing with success a speech act of the form F(Q). Unlike hyperintensional logic, our logic of propositions is compatible with the classical Boolean laws of propositional identity such as the symmetry and the associativity of conjunction and the reduction of double negation. (shrink)

This paper does not deal with the topic of ‘the generosity of artificial languages from an Asian or a comparative perspective’. Rather, it is concerned with a particular case taken from a development in the Western tradition, when in the wake of the rise of formal logic at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century people in philosophy and later in linguistics started to use formal languages in the study of the semantics of natural languages. (...) This undertaking rests on certain philosophical assumptions and instantiates a particular methodology, that we want to examine critically. However, that in itself is still too broad a topic for a single paper, so we will focus on a particular aspect, viz., the distinction between grammatical form and logical form and the crucial role it plays in how the relationship between natural languages and formal languages is understood in this tradition. We will uncover two basic assumptions that underlie the standard view on the distinction between grammatical form and logical form, and discuss how they have contributed to the shaping of a particular methodology and a particular view on the status of semantics as a discipline. (shrink)

This paper embeds the core part of Discourse Representation Theory in the classical theory of types plus a few simple axioms that allow the theory to express key facts about variables and assignments on the object level of the logic. It is shown how the embedding can be used to combine core analyses of natural language phenomena in Discourse Representation Theory with analyses that can be obtained in Montague Semantics.

This dissertation investigates the ways in which natural language restricts the domains of quantifiers. Adverbs of quantification are analyzed as quantifying over situations. The domain of quantifiers is pragmatically constrained: apparent processes of "semantic partition" are treated as pragmatic epiphenomena. The introductory Chapter 1 sketches some of the background of work on natural language quantification and begins the analysis of adverbial quantification over situations. Chapter 2 develops the central picture of "semantic partition" as a side-effect of pragmatic processes of anaphora (...) resolution. I argue that the apparent effects of topic/focus articulation and presuppositional information on the interpretation of quantifiers are not the result of a direct and local mechanism of sentence grammar. Instead, I develop an analysis where the link is established via the anaphoric dependence of quantifier domains on the discourse context. Chapter 3 discusses the analysis of conditional clauses as quantifier restrictors, concentrating on the question whether conditional clauses restrict quantifiers directly or indirectly. A treatment is explored which has if-clauses constrain the value of the hidden domain variable of the restricted quantifier. Chapter 4, on unless-clauses, and Chapter 5, on only if- and even if-clauses, present some issues in the compositional analysis of complex conditional clauses. These chapters significantly expand the data coverage of the theory of A-quantification. Building on previous work of mine on exceptives, I analyze unless-clauses as exceptive operators on A-quantifiers. The analysis of only if-clauses, treated as conditional clauses that combine if with the focus adverb only, unearthes some interesting new properties. Chapter 6, finally, examines the phenomenon of donkey-anaphora in the light of the results of the previous chapters. I show that a solution to the proportion problem may become possible once we combine the situation-semantic approach to adverbial quantification with the pragmatic theory developed in Chapter 2 and further elaborated in the analysis of donkey anaphora in complex conditionals. (shrink)

Geach’s rich paper ‘A Program for Syntax’ introduced many ideas into the arena of categorial grammar, not all of which have been given the attention they warrant in the thirty years since its first publication. Rather surprisingly, one of our findings (Section 3 below) is that the paper not only does not contain a statement of what has widely come to be known as “Geach’s Rule”, but in fact presents considerations which are inimical to the adoption of the rule in (...) question. With regard to at least some amongst the numerous other points extracted here from Geach’s discussion, we shall not be able to reach so definitive a conclusion, and content ourselves with giving the issues an airing. (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)