Barriers is Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 13.

I reject the contention that an important theoretical difference exists between formal and natural languages.

This thesis is divided into two parts. Part I consists of a discussion of how a Davidsonian semantic theory might be enriched by some of the resources of modern linguistic theory. Two chapters are found in this part of the dissertation. Chapter 1 sets up the general theoretical framework, discussing the Davidsonian program and showing how the task of semantic theory is to define a truth predicate off of the LF representations of natural language sentences. Chapter 2 sketches the shape (...) that such a formal truth predicate might take. Special attention is given to natural language quantification and to attributive modifiers. ;Part II of the thesis focuses on a problem that has taken up much attention from those doing semantics within the model-theoretic tradition, namely the problem of the attitudes. Much of their work has proceeded under the assumption that such problems can only be treated in a semantic theory endowed with a fairly rich model theory and a possible world ontology. Part II of this thesis may be regarded as an attempt not so much to show an error in the model-theoretic approach, but merely to show that there is an alternative. ;We focus only on a certain class of attitude reports in this thesis, namely "referential attitude reports". These are distinguished from propositional attitudes, in that there is no "that-clause" signaling the intensional environment. Typical examples of referential attitudes include sentences like 'John seeks a donkey' and 'Bill is hoping for the fastest bus'. ;Two difficulties arise for any treatment of referential attitudes. First, there is the problem of how one is to get what is sometimes called the "non-specific" or "attributive" reading. It is this problem that takes up our attention in chapter 3. The second problem concerns the "specific" readings of referential attitude reports, particularly when it seems that the object of intention is non-existent . This problem is addressed in chapter 4. (shrink)