According to a straightforward, conservative account of English demonstratives, simple and complex demonstratives are referring expressions belonging to the same semantic category (but they could be understood as either terms or quantifiers); the denotation of a complex demonstrative “dF” (if it has one) must satisfy the nominal “F” in “dF”; and both simple and complex demonstratives function as rigid designators. According to a recent alternative advanced by Lepore and Ludgwig, simple and complex demonstratives belong to different semantic categories (the former (...) being terms while the latter are restricted quantifier phrases); the denotation of a complex demonstrative “dF”(if it has one) need not satisfy the nominal “F”; and complex demonstratives can have narrow scope, which implies that they do not always function as rigid designators. This paper provides evidence that supports the conservative account against the claims of Lepore and Ludwig’s alternative. (shrink)

In this paper I review the Neo-Davidsonian semantics of prepositional phrases and secondary predication. I argue that certain types of examples pose challenge to this semantics. I present an alternative to the Neo-Davidsonian analysis which successfully deals with the problematic examples. The core idea lies in representing theta-roles not as functions from events to their participants, but rather as argument-labels encoding the role of each argument in a given verb. As a result, natural-language predicates can now be treated in the (...) manner in which relations are treated in the relational model of data, that is, as naming sets of tuples in which every object is given together with its role named by a corresponding attribute (a theta-role). Such a representation allows the employment of relational algebra operators to calculate the extensions of complex predicates (predicates built out of atomic predicates and/or atomic predicates and prepositions). I lay out the foundations of a relational FOL appropriate for the representation of natural-language predicates and present solutions to the problematic examples. From a practical perspective, the expressions of a relational FOL can be translated to a relational algebra or SQL, which makes it possible to operate with these three languages on the same relational model of data. From a philosophical perspective, a relational FOL permits a return to ‘property-based’ semantics, one in which properties named by predicates are those of individuals, and not of events. (shrink)

The paper provides an alternative interpretation of ‘pair points’, discussed in Beall et al., "On the ternary relation and conditionality", J. of Philosophical Logic 41(3), 595-612. Pair points are seen as points viewed from two different ‘perspectives’ and the latter are explicated in terms of two independent valuations. The interpretation is developed into a semantics using pairs of Kripke models (‘pair models’). It is demonstrated that, if certain conditions are fulfilled, pair models are validity-preserving copies of positive substructural models. This (...) yields a general soundness and completeness result for a variety of (positive) substructural logics with respect to multimodal Kripke frames with binary accessibility relations. In addition, an epistemic interpretation of pair models is provided. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that descriptive content associated with a proper name can serve as a truth-conditionally relevant adjunct and be an additional contribution of the name to the truth-conditions. Definite descriptions the so-and-so associated by speakers with a proper name can be used as qualifying prepositional phrases as so-and-so, so sentences containing a proper name NN is doing something could be understood as NN is doing something as NN (which means as so-and-so). Used as an adjunct, the descriptive (...) content of a proper name expresses the additional circumstances of an action (a manner, reason, goal, time or purpose) and constitute a part of a predicate. I argue that qualifying prepositional phrases should be analyzed as predicate modifiers and propose a formal representation of modified predicates. The additional truth-conditional relevance of the descriptive content of a proper name helps to explain the phenomenon of the substitution failure of coreferential names in simple sentences. (shrink)