Download Philosophy of Language Starting issues Some things are languages

Philosophy of Language
Starting issues
1. Some things are languages, some are not. What is a language?
2. When is something a dialect of a language rather than a distinct language?
3. Main branches: Phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics. We are mostly interested in
semantics.
4. How does philosophy of language differ from linguistics?
Interpretation
1. I can’t just tell you what I mean – you have to work it out. Radical interpretation.
Context
1. Context does not determine what a speaker means (unless context includes facts about
what the speaker means). E.g. what she means by ‘here’. It might determine what she says
(i.e. no change in what she says by ‘here’ without a change in context).
Opacity
1. Is this opaque?: “A passenger found a hoax.” “A passenger found a bomb threat.”
Adjectival modifiers
1. What do we mean by ‘Adj Noun’?
2. There is a very wide variety of ways that we use adjectival modifiers:
a. Pistol
b. Red pistol
c. New pistol
d. Fake pistol
e. Former pistol
f. Big pistol
g. Good pistol
h. Space pistol
i. Non pistol
j. Alleged pistol
k. Known pistol
l. Future pistol
m. Possible pistol
n. Dirty pistol (3 interpretations: pistol that is dirty, pistol that makes things dirty when it
is fired, pistol that is owned by a dirty person).
3. Speakers just have to figure it out on a case-by-case basis.
4. Because of use facts, some of these mean certain things, which is an interpretive clue, but
one that can be over-ridden.
5. A possibility: in every case the adjective modifies the meaning of the noun – it is never a
conjunction (contrary to popular opinion).
Understanding
1. Suppose someone does not know whether water is an element or a compound. Does this
mean that she doesn’t know what is meant by ‘water’?
2. Two things:
a. Knowing which thing we refer to using ‘water’.
b. Knowing what that thing is like.
Norms of assertion
1. Why is the second more acceptable than the first?:
a. It’s the best place in Australia.
b. I think it’s the best place in Australia.
2. These are related to Moore’s paradox. See Moore (1942, ‘A reply to my critics’, in The
Philosophy of G. E. Moore), p. 543.
a. p, but not-(I believe p)
b. p, but I believe (not-p)
c. Note that these are all ok:
i. p, but not-(he believes p)
ii. p, but he believes (not-p)
iii. if p, then p but not-(I believe p)
iv. if p, then p but I believe (not-p)
v. p, but not-(I believed p) (past tense)
vi. p, but not-(I will believe p) (future tense)
Compositionality
1. Lots of languages are compositional.
2. What compositionality is.
3. Can there be non-compositional languages?
A typical statement of the principle of compositionality is something like this:
(1)
The meaning of a sentence is a function of its structure and the meanings of its parts.
At the level of general formulation (not quarrelling over the details) I want to suggest a
position that I haven’t seen entertained in any of the literature on the topic. The position is
this:
(1)
The meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of its parts. Which function?
That depends on the structure of the sentence.
(2)
Sentence structures are functions from meanings to meanings.
So we have:
(1)
The meaning of a sentence is its structure applied to the meanings of its parts.
I think that this is like claiming:
(*)
The value of an n-place function f on an n-tuple of arguments (a1, …, an) is a function of
f and (a1, … an).
This is true. The value of f on (a1, …, an) is a function of f and (a1, …, an). For if it were not,
then there would be two distinct values of f on (a1, … an), which there are not because f is a
function. (*) is true because of what functions are. If f is an n-place function, then the value of
f on an n-tuple of arguments is a function of f and the n-tuple.
I propose that (1) is true because the structure of a sentence is a function from the meanings of
its parts to the meaning of the sentence.
Let F be what we might call the application function: if f is an n-place function and s is an ntuple of values then F(f, s) = f(s). The value of the 2-place function f(x, y) = x + y on the pair
(2, 3) is a function of f and (2, 3). Which function? The application function. F(f(x, y) = x + y,
(2, 3)) = f(2, 3) = 2 + 3 = 5.
I suggest that (*) is true, as is stands, and that is true because of what sentence structures are.
The structure of a sentence is a function from a sequence of meanings to a meaning. Thus, the
goal of compositional semantics is not to work out how the meaning of a sentence is
determined by its structure and the meanings of it parts – that is trivial. The goal is to work
out what its structure is.
Like this. We have a function. We know its value for various sequences of arguments. The
aim is not to work out how we determine from the function and the arguments what its value
is, but how to determine its value from the arguments – that is, what the function is.
f(x, y) = x + y
g(x, y) = xy
h(x, y) = x – y
f(g(x, y), h(z, w)) = F(x, y, z, w) = (xy) + (z – w)
(*)
a. John kissed Mary
b. [T past [ag John [ev kiss [pa Mary]]]]
h(past, g(m(‘John’), f(m(‘kiss’), m(‘Mary’))). Each constituent corresponds the value of a
structure function.
So if we think of the sentence as having three parts then the structure of the sentence is the
following function:
F(x, y, z) = h(past, g(x, f(y, z)))
Syntax
1. Lexical categories: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition. Others: postposition,
determiner, demonstrative, articles, conjunctions, complementizers. How lexical
categories are defined.
2. Constituent structure. Tests.
3. Phrases, heads, bar-levels.
4. Agreement: case, number, gender.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
The structure of the verb phrase. Arguments. Adjuncts. Theta-roles.
C-command.
Raising constructions: subject-to-subject, subject-to-object, passivisation.
Control constructions.
Wh-phrases.
Language death
1. Languages are dying.
Figures of speech
1. Tropes (figures of sense)
a. Metaphor
b. Hyperbole
c. Simile
d. Personification
e. Metonymy
f. Synecdoche
g. Irony
2. Figures of form
a. Apostrophe
b. Rhetorical questions
c. Tricolon
d. Asyndeton (omission of conjunct)
e. Polysyndeton
f. Hysteron proteron (later earlier)
3. Figures of sound
a. Alliteration
b. Assonance
c. Onomatopoeia
4. Figures of repetition
a. Anaphora
b. Polyptoton (repetition of words in different grammatical forms)
c. Epanalepsis
Interesting questions
1. Does language make us lazy?
Interesting observations
1. Two uses of ‘but’:
a. She’s British but quite fun. (Normally, if British then not fun.)
b. He’s perfect but I can’t have him. (Not: Normally, if perfect then I can have him.)
2. Good and right choices:
a. He made a good choice
b. *He made the good choice
c. *He made a right choice
d. He made the right choice
3. How can a fictional story make us sad? (Even when we know that it is fictional.)
Ambiguity
1. Reading:
a. Kent Bach, In Routledge.
b. Cruse, D. A. (1986), Lexical Semantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
c. Zwicky, A. and Sadock, J. (1975), ‘Ambiguity tests and how to fail them’, in Kimball,
J. (ed.) (1975), Syntax and Semantics 4 (New York: Academic Press),
2. For a linguistic item (word, phrase, sentence) to be ambiguous is for it to have more than
one (truth conditional?) meaning. ‘light’ = not very heavy, not very dark.
3. Types of ambiguity:
a. Lexical
b. Structural
i. Two types of structural: attachment (‘I saw a man with binoculars’), scope (‘Every
man loves a woman’).
4. Sentences with lexical ambiguity:
a. I have a light suit.
b. The duchess can’t bear children.
5. Sentences with structural ambiguity:
a. The police shot the rioters with guns.
b. John came home hopefully.
c. I’ve clearly put my ideas on the table.
d. She is a Tibetan history teacher.
e. John is a student of high moral principles.
f. There were many short men and women. (small dogs and cats)
g. Visiting relatives can be boring.
h. The chicken is ready [PRO to eat]. Is this structural ambiguity?
i. Perot knows a richer man than Trump. (elliptical)(is this structural ambiguity?)
j. John loves his mother. (?)
k. John loves his mother and so does Bill. (Is this structural ambiguity, or semantic
underdetermination?) Similar: ‘Everybody loves somebody’, ‘The next president
might be a woman’, ‘Ralph wants a sloop’.
l. I’d like to see more of you.
m. I’d like to have intercourse with you. (?)
6. Sentences with both:
a. I left her behind for you.
b. He saw her duck.
7. Other types:
a. Act/object
b. Process/product: ‘building’, ‘shot’, ‘writing’, ‘inference’, ‘statement’, ‘thought’.
c. Type/token: ‘animal’, ‘book’, ‘car’, ‘sentence’, ‘word’, ‘letter’, ‘concept’, ‘event’,
‘mental state’.
d. Actual/dispositional: ‘fast’: ‘This is a fast car’.
e. Building/institution: ‘school’. ‘The school is going on a picnic’. How many schools are
in federal hill? Just one - reason to think ambiguous. How many schools are at the
carnival?
8. Are these cases of ambiguity?
a. Referential/attributive use of definite descriptions.
b. ‘Or’ inclusive/exclusive.
c. Anaphoric/deictic use of a pronoun: ‘Oedipus loves his mother’. Ambiguity, or not
clear
d. who ‘he’ refers to?
e. ‘Everybody loves somebody’, ‘No student solved exactly two problems’.
f. ‘The next president might be a woman’
g. ‘Ralph wants a sloop’
9. What’s the ambiguity here: ‘Quitting is hard, not quitting is harder.”
10. The following sentence has 32 interpretations (3 ambiguous lexical items, 2 attachment
ambiguities, total: 25 = 32):
a. Old friends and acquaintances remembered Pat’s last time in California.
11. What kind of ambiguity?
a. Flying planes can be dangerous.
12. Don’t confuse ambiguity with vagueness, unclarity, inexplicitness, indexicality,
metaphorical uses:
a. Salt ate the paint on the right fender.
b. Literally? Maybe not, in which case does not count as a possible other meaning of
‘eat’.
13. Some terminology:
a. Homonyms:
b. Homophones: distinct words that sound the same. ‘desert’ and ‘dessert’. ‘peak’ and
‘peek’.
c. Homographs: distinct words that are spelled the same. ‘bank’ and ‘bank’. The noun
‘bear’ and the verb ‘bear’.
d. The two categories cross-cut:
Homographs
Homophones
Not
homophones
‘bank’, ‘bank’
‘desert’,
‘desert’
Not
homographs
‘peak’, ‘peek’
‘bank’, ‘peak’
e. Polysemy: one word with more than one meaning, but related in such a way that it does
not count as ambiguous. Polysemous: ‘do’, ‘put’, ‘at’, ‘in’, ‘to’. ‘Point’: punctuation
mark, sharp end, detail, argument. Are all these meanings related? A common
meaning? Smallest unit?
f. Syncretism: ambiguity of inflectional morphemes. ‘s’: 3sg agreement, plurals,
possessives. ‘The weapon(‘)s inspector’ is ambiguous (unless seen written - difference
marked orthographically but not phonologically).
14. Ambiguity tests:
a. Unrelated antonyms (‘hard’: ‘soft’, ‘easy’).
b. Conjunction reduction. (crossed interpretation).
c. The tailor pressed one suit in his shop and another in the municipal court.
d. She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair.
e. He called her a fool and a cab.
f. But note the following. “I’m going to the bank and so is John.” What if we think about
the two different banks in the same way – is there then no zeugma? If not, then this is a
limitation of the zeugma test.
Word conversion
1. Interesting case: the noun ‘respect’ and the verb ‘respect’. Different words?
2. Do we have distinct meanings in the following pairs?
a. He weighed the package; The package weighed 2kg.
b. He burned the book; The book burned.
c. He flew the kite; The kite flew.
d. He walked the dog; The dog walked.
e. John ate a hamburger; John ate.
f. I respect Mary; I have respect for Mary.
3. Sufficient conditions for being distinct words: different spelling, different pronunciation,
different etymology (‘bat’ and ‘bat’), different syntactic categories?
4. Turning a noun into a verb:
a. I am going to cinema my girlfriend.
b. I am going to cinema the movie.
c. I am going to cinema my dinner.
5. Examples:
a. Nouns: note, chip, pen, suit (clear), bank (clear), bat, cow (interesting).
b. Adjectives: light, deep, dry, hard.
c. Verbs: bear, call, draw, run, bank (clear), file (clear).
d. Mixed: over (A, P), long (A, V)
Underarticulation
An interesting example:
“They weren’t supposed to die, and you weren’t supposed to go to jail. But they did, and you
did.”
Neale (some express complete props, some don’t):
(*)
a. It’s raining.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
I am a citizen
The mayor is underpaid.
Most people think the mayor is underpaid.
John is ready to leave.
I haven’t drunk any wine.
The Russian voted for the Russian.
The (former) hostages were greeted at the White House.
Table six wants her steak rare.
Neale calls it: the Underarticulation Thesis. Calls people who accept it linguistic pragmatists.
Perry, Sperber and Wilson, Carston, Recanati, Searle, Neale, Grice.
Neale: Our interpretive abilities are so good that we can reasonably expect our addressees to
identify the thoughts we seek to express, even when the linguistic meanings of the
expressions we use fall short of serving up the precise concepts involved in the thought.
Examples from Neale (2004, p. 102):
I haven’t had breakfast (this morning).
Maria wants to get married (to Fred).
Maria and Fred want to get married (to one another).
Maria and Fred pushed the car to the garage (together).
I haven’t seen Maria (here tonight).
You are not going to die (from that injury).
Everyone (at Ragga’s party last night) had a great time.
No one (from the US embassy) has arrived yet.
(The man on) table six wants to change his order.
The (man who ordered a) ham sandwich on (table) twelve wants pickles.
Every farmer (in my village) owns exactly one donkey and feeds the donkey (he owns) at
night.
It’s snowing (in Reykjavik).
I hadn’t noticed (that Mike was limping).
Maria wants to leave (this party).
Maria is ready (to leave (this party)).
The car (Tom bought this morning) broke down on the way (to Tom’s) home.
The Russian (judge) voted for the Russian (skater).
The (former) hostages were greeted at the White House.
Recanati Stuff
Oxford Talk
‘Semantic flexibility’ (is context sensitivity): (see Keenan?)
Drop chemistry
Cut the grass, cut the cake
(have not failed to obey the order if cut cake with lawnmower, or grass with knife)(how many
things were cut?)
Finish the cake, finish the book
Likes my sister, likes roasted pork
Fast typist, fast runner
Occasional meaning of ‘big’ in ‘big mountain’ is ‘big for a mountain’.
Small elephant, small animal.
John’s boat, John’s mother. (John’s [boat and mother])
The policeman stopped the car (there are different manners of stopping - is the manner part of
the truth conditions? Is there a situation in which it is false on one reading, true on another?)
Saturation/modulation: the meaning m of an expression is mapped to a distinct meaning f(m),
where f is a pragmatic function. It is optional, and pragmatically controlled.
My question: ‘John looks French’ - is this modulation? Ought to be possible not to enrich. But
what if must be enriched to get a proposition? Problem: John looks French, and he sounds that
way too. What does ‘that way’ refer to?
Varieties of modulation:
Free enrichment - ought to be optional.
Sense extension - the ATM swallowed my card. (does he think this is literally false?)
Transfer - ‘The ham sandwich left without paying’, ‘I am parked out back’ (note: not ‘I’ that
is transferred to my car, because cannot do that with ‘I’ in other contexts. ‘park’ here
expresses a different property.
What is said
Has a four-level picture (the syncretic view): (salmon has something like the same. Bach adds
a level to allow for what is said being a propositional radical; has completion and expansion
(implicitures). What is said (less than min) goes to what is said (min) via completion then to
what is said (max) via expansion).
Sentence meaning
linguistic meaning of a sentence. context independent, not propositional, literal.
What is said
proposition expressed by an utterance of the sentence. context dependent, propositional.
Constrained by sentence meaning. propositions expressed have to be compatible with the
semantic potential of the sentence. Question: how constrained is this??
Recanati splits this into two:
What is saidmin: a minimalist notion.
What is saidmax: and a non-minimalist one that we need to capture the input to Gricean
reasoning. This corresponds to the intuitive truth conditions of the utterance.
What is implicated
proposition conveyed by the utterance, context dependent, propositional. Not constrained by
sentence meaning.
Pragmatic minimalism: what is said arises only via saturation - triggered by stuff in the
sentence. Every part of what is said must correspond to something in the sentence.
(*)
a. I’ve had breakfast (today).
b. You are not going to die (from that cut).
c. The policeman stopped John’s car (in a certain way).
The is a difference between what (*a) expresses and what the speaker means. That is because
nothing in the sentence constrains us to go beyond the minimal interpretation. These are
examples of free enrichment.
Pragmatic maximalism: primary vs secondary contextual processes. The first help determine
what is said, without presupposing that what is said has already been determined. Saturation is
a typical one (it is mandatory). Also have free enrichment (it is optional). The second are
inferential - take what is said as input and yield further propositions as output. There are
optional processes of both primary and secondary varieties.
Bach Stuff
Seemingly Semantic Intuitions
Minding the Gap
You Don’t Say?
Speaking Loosely: Sentence Nonliterality.
Sentence nonliterality (as opposed to constituent nonliterality). Very pervasive. Not words
being used in nonliteral ways, but sentences being used in nonliteral ways, even though all
words are used literally. Calls it speaking loosely. We omit words that could have made what
we meant more explicit. The exact words don't matter. The speaker may not even have a
determinate proposition in mind. It’s simply a matter of leaving words out. Is a variety of
speaking nonliterally: saying one thing, meaning something else instead (i.e. intend to convey
something else, other than the proposition that is expressed by the sentence). Speaking
nonliterally is widespread: we hardly ever mean what we say. Speaking loosely, in particular,
is also widespread. Other varieties of speaking nonliterally: metaphor, metonymy. What the
speaker means = what the speaker intends to convey = the content of the utterance. Sentence
nonliterality: what the speaker means is not the exact proposition, as compositionally
determined, that is expressed by the sentence. A speaker who utters (*a) is not saying that
Jack and Jill went up the hill together, even if that is what he means. Distinction: what a
speaker says, what a speaker means in saying it. Sentence nonliterality is so pervasive that we
tend not to notice it. We do not form a thought to express, think of a convoluted sentence that
would express it fully explicitly, and then, in the interests of efficiency, work out a stripped
down version to utter instead. There is a difference between linguistic meaning and speaker
meaning. Distinguishes what is said from what is asserted. The latter is what the speaker
means, not what the speaker says (?).
Objection: sentences involve phonologically null constituents - variables and other empty
categories (slots to be filled). Response: no reason to believe in the presence of such covert
variables. Admits that it is plausible in the case of syntactically complete but semantically
incomplete sentences. But must give positive syntactic evidence.
Some sentences, given what they mean, cannot readily be used literally - hard to not use them
nonliterally. ‘Dennis got herpes and had sex.’ ‘Dennis had sex and got herpes.’ Hard to use
either to convey the bare conjunction.
Underdetermination. The linguistic meaning of a sentence generally underdetermines what a
speaker means in uttering it. But there is just: what the sentence means, what the speaker
means in uttering it. There is what the speaker means and what his listener takes him to mean
- there is no independent utterance content. Semantic properties, like syntactic and
phonological properties, are linguistic properties. Pragmatic properties belong to acts of
uttering sentences in the course of communication. Semantic content is a property of the
sentence, not the utterance.
Semantic intuitions about sentences, and about what is said in utterances of those sentences.
People’s intuitions tend not to be sensitive to the difference between what a speaker says and
what she means, at least not until sensitised. We are often responsive to non-semantic
information. The central aim of semantics is to account for semantic facts, not intuitions.
Semantic intuitions might not reveal semantic facts. In the course of speaking and listening to
one another don’t generally consciously reflect on semantic contents of sentences we hear or
what is said in their utterance. We are focused on what is being communicated, not on what is
being said. Our intuitions tend to be insensitive to the distinction between what is said and
what is meant. We imagine typical utterances, which involve sentence nonliterality, and put
the implicit stuff into the semantics of the sentence. We tend to attribute something to the
conventional meaning of the sentence which in fact is attributable only to typical utterances of
it.
Each of these three sentences is ambiguous, but we are not likely to notice it in the first two
cases:
(*)
a. Bill scratched the car with an umbrella.
b. Bill scratched the car with a broken tail light.
c. Bill scratched the car with a broken antenna.
(*)
a. The soldiers exchanged their arms for food.
b. The soldiers used their arms to protect their faces.
c. The soldiers celebrated by waving their arms in the air.
Examples of sentences used loosely:
(*)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
h.
i.
j.
k.
l.
m.
n.
o.
p.
q.
r.
s.
Billy will get promoted if (and only if) he works hard.
Mary has (exactly) three cars.
Bobby hasn’t taken a bath (lately).
Molly got infected and (then, because of her infection) went to the hospital.
That car doesn’t (merely) look expensive - it is expensive.
Nobody (important) goes there any more - it’s too crowded.
You’re not going to die (from that cut).
There is beer (to drink) in the fridge.
They'll play only one more game.
You'll be out of here if you don't publish five articles.
Jack went to the cliff and jumped (off the cliff).
Jill got married and became pregnant (in that order).
Helen poured some wine (intentionally).
Helen spilled some wine (unintentionally).
Roy has always been an honest judge (since he’s been a judge).
The stroke victim is not going to die (from that stroke).
Dr. Atkins is not (what I would describe as) a physician but a quack.
Jack and Jill went up the hill (together).
Jack and Jill are engaged (to each other).
Bach takes these to be examples of conversational impliciture. In each case, what the
speaker means is distinct from what he is saying - he is speaking loosely, a variety of
speaking nonliterally. What he means includes an implicit qualification on what he is saying,
something that is not really part of what is said. Impliciture is not logical strengthening, but
conceptual strengthening. Not generated by obvious falsity of what is said, but by its not
being relevant. Impliciture: one says something but does not mean that. (Implicature: one says
and means one thing and thereby asserts something else in addition.)
The sentences in (*) express complete propositions, but in uttering them a speaker is likely to
have meant the more specific bracketed things. The bracketed expressions are not part of the
original sentence. Reason? Cancellation and reinforcement. Might seem that the short
versions of the above express the same proposition as the long versions. But this is an
impliciture. It can be cancelled and reinforced.
(*)
a. Billy will get promoted if he works hard, though he might get promoted even if he
does not. (cancelled)
b. Billy will get promoted if and only if he works hard. (reinforced)
My idea: Intuitively use the same sentence, not different sentences, when using (*?) to
communicate either (*a) or (*b). But: maybe what is said is the part of the sentence that is
pronounced? That would explain why we think that the same thing is said in each case, even
if a different sentence has been used. Also, if there is an aphonic indexical then that would
explain why the same thing is said in each case.
Any proposition that the speaker is communicating that is distinct from what he says is
explicitly cancellable (Grice). Even for semantically incomplete sentences? Maybe it can’t be
cancelled if the impliciture is now part of the conventional meaning?
Has what he calls the syntactic correlation constraint: what is said must correspond to the
elements of the sentence, their order, and their syntactic character (adopted from Grice). If
any element of the content of an utterance does not correspond to any element of the sentence
being uttered, then it is not part of what is said. What is said is determined compositionally by
the semantic contents of the constituents of the sentence as a function of their syntactic
relationship. Minimalist conception of semantic content. The meaning of a sentence is
determined compositionally by the meanings of its constituents as a function of its syntactic
structure.
One test for not being part of what is said is passing Grice’s test of cancellability. ‘Rick and
Ann are engaged, but not to each other’. No contradiction here, so ‘to each other’ is not part
of what is said in ‘Rick and Ann are engaged’. But is this a necessary condition? ‘John looks
American, and I don’t mean he looks that way’ (pointing to the way Americans look).
Syntactically complete but semantically incomplete sentences. Thinks it is a mistake to
assume that every sentence expresses a complete proposition. The syntactic requirements on
well-formed sentences do not exclude the case of sentences whose semantic interpretation is
not a complete proposition. There are many sorts of sentence that do not express a complete
proposition, not even relative to a context - i.e. even after any indexical references are
assigned and any ambiguities resolved. Calls these syntactically complete, but semantically
incomplete (or underdeterminate). They require completion to figure out what a speaker
means. This is a problem for compositional semantics only if we assume the meaning of a
complete sentence must be a complete proposition. If we take what is said to be what the
speaker means, then to preserve compositional semantics would have to posit all sorts of
aphonic stuff in the sentence. Or have to posit all kinds of ambiguity. Examples:
(*)
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
Bonnie is ready.
Clyde is finished.
Jack and Jill climbed far enough.
Jill first got married.
Martha noticed.
I’ve had enough.
An utterer of (*a) might mean that Bonnie is ready to go, but she hasn’t said that. She has just
said that Bonnie is ready. It may be that a sentence can only be used to communicate a
complete proposition (plausible assumption: what a speaker means must be a complete
proposition), but that doesn’t mean that any sentence used to communicate a complete
proposition must itself express one.
Bach’s IQ test:
(*)
a.
b.
c.
d.
Mary said that Bonnie is ready.
Mary said that Clyde is finished.
Mary said that Jack and Jill climbed far enough.
Mary said that Jill first got married.
Need to distinguish sentences which, like sentences containing indexicals, contain
constituents in need of semantic values, from sentences which are simply semantically
incomplete.
Whereas semantic information is encoded in what is uttered, pragmatic information is
generated by, or at least made relevant by, the act of uttering it. What a speaker implicates in
saying what he says is carried not by what he says but by his saying it.
Even if what a speaker means consists precisely in the semantic content of the sentence he
utters, this fact is not determined by that semantic content - no sentence has to be used in
accordance with its semantic content. Even a sentence that contains the word ‘literally’ can be
used nonliterally. The speaker’s communicative intention cannot contribute to the
determination of what is said. Communicative intentions enter in only at the level of what the
speaker means.
(*)
The chicken is ready to eat.
Grammaticality
What good is grammaticality?
Why is the first grammatical whereas the second is not?
(*)
a. John has finished.
b. John has completed.
(*)
a. John finished.
b. John completed.
(*)
a. John ate earlier.
b. John devoured earlier.
(*)
a. John tried three times.
b. John attempted three times.
(*)
a. John fathered a child.
b. John parented a child. (actually, maybe this is not ungrammatical)
(*)
A: Is anybody ready?
B: John is.
Is the sentence that B uttered grammatical?
Here is a sentence that is hard to not end with a preposition: ‘John is taken care of’.
The horse raced past the barn fell.
The dog the boy the girl the cat scratched kissed kicked barked.
Buffalo (adj) buffalo (n) buffalo (v) buffalo (adj) buffalo (n).
Fish (n) fish (v) fish (n).
Fish (n) [(that) fish fish] fish fish.
Ellipsis
Can those guys do anything?
John can waltz, but Bill can’t ({waltz, do anything}).
Bill can’t ({waltz, do anything}), but John can waltz.
With nothing else said:
I can’t (live the box).
Claim: there is only one kind of ellipsis.
Indexicals
What is the meaning of ‘he’, and how does it differ from the meaning of ‘she’? According to
‘Word Meaning’, the first is the question: What is ‘he’ used to mean. Here is a plausible
answer: ‘he’ is used to mean a male. The answer to the second is: ‘she’ is used to mean a
female.
Is there anything in common between the meaning of ‘he’ and ‘she’? Here is one thing that is
true of both: ‘he’ is used to mean a person; ‘she’ is used to mean a person. Does this mean
that there is something the same about their meanings? Maybe not, given that this is not the
most specific thing that we can say about what they mean.
What happens when a speaker uses ‘he’ to mean something that is not male? E.g.: I utter ‘He
is happy’, using ‘he’ to refer to my sister. There is something odd about this. Here is my
suggestion for what is odd: the speaker is using ‘he’ non-fashionably (non-standardly), and
this makes the interpreter wonder why. Note that the problem only comes about if the
interpreter knows which thing the speaker means by ‘he’, and knows that that thing is not
male.
Using Indexicals
We can use indexicals like ‘I’ and ‘here’ and ‘we’ to do more than traditionally claimed.
I can use ‘I’ to refer to you: ‘I’m coming down with a cold am I?’
I can use ‘we’ to refer to you: ‘We’re going to be difficult are we?’, ‘I see that we’ve found
the chocolates’.
I can use ‘here’ while in Manila to refer to Sydney: ‘Imagine I’m in Sydney. It’s raining
here…’. ‘It’s raining in Sydney, so if I’m in Sydney then it’s raining here.’
Pronouns and Anaphora
Reference to salient thing:
He is annoying. (uses ‘he’ to refer to a salient male)
Describe it to me. (said to Macbeth)
Coreference:
John left. He was ill. (uses ‘he’ to refer to a salient male)
A man came into the bar. He got drunk.
Phlogiston does not exist. We should forget about it. (Here we have a problem already –
maybe this shows that the previous example is not so simple)
Macbeth saw a dagger. It was bloody.
John found a donkey. He beat it. (the speaker does have a particular donkey in mind, even if
there are no donkeys. Macbeth was seeing a dagger, in a sense.)
Bound:
Every male lawyer believes that he is smart.
x(x is a male lawyer  x believes that x is smart)
Other:
Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.
John wants a beer. He wants it to be cold.
Different uses of pronouns:
(From a talk by Jonathan Schaffer at Macq. Uni in Jan 2010)
Deictic: ‘She left me’
Anaphoric, definite: ‘Sam is married. He has three children.’
Anaphoric, indefinite: ‘Sam owns a Buick. He drives it to work.’
Bound: ‘Every woman believes that she is happy.’
Donkey: ‘Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.’
Strict/sloppy: ‘Sam loves his wife and Tom does too.’
Uninterpreted person: ‘Only I did my homework.’
Schaffer: these can all be mimicked in tense and mood.
Gradable adjectives
What about the following: ‘John is very American’. We might mean something that is true,
even if John is not American. What we mean is that John very much behaves the way
Americans behave (or something like that). The first analysis below would lead to an infinite
regress, but the second would be ok. There is a problem with grammaticality, but I’m
guessing that it’s not significant.
(*)
a. John is [the way one is [if very American]].
b. John is very [the way one is if American].
That (*a) is the start of the infinite regress is shown in (*) below. (*a) above can be
paraphrased more fully as in (*a) below. (*a) contains the embedded clause ‘one is very
American’, which must be given the same treatment. So (*a) can be paraphrased as (*b). (*b),
in turn, contains the embedded clause ‘one is very American’, which, in turn, must be given
the same treatment. So (*b) can be paraphrased as in (*c). And so on, ad infinitum.
(*)
a. John is the way one is if [one is very American].
b. John is the way one is if [one is the way one is if [one is very American]].
c. John is the way one is if [one is the way one is if [one is the way one is if [one is
very American]]].
(*b) does not lead to an infinite regress. It can be paraphrased more fully as in (*) below.
Since in (*) there is no embedded clause ‘one is very American’, there is no infinite regress.
(*)
John is very the way one is if [one is American].
Indicative conditionals
If P then Q
Q, if P
Cases in which P are cases in which Q.
So we use ‘If P then Q’ to quantify over cases, without making that explicit.
‘P’ and ‘Q’ are predicates of cases.
Cases need not be entire possible worlds. They could be the possible outcomes of the roll of a
die. Then there are six cases.
If P then Q (a claim about how the regions are related)
Either not P or Q (a claim about which region the actual case are in)
Either not P or Q
So, if P then Q
(validity controversial)
If P then Q
Either not P or Q
So, cases in which P are cases in which Q
Cases in which not P are cases in which Q
So, either not P or Q
(validity not controversial)
So, either not P or Q
Nice: can explain the intuition that assertions of conditionals are conditional assertions.
Nice: makes an asymmetry between the antecedent and consequent.
It is raining
(1)
(2)
(3)
It is raining.
Nina danced last night.
Steel isn’t strong enough.
What does (1) semantically express on an occasion of use (what is its semantic content)? That
is, what does (1) mean? That is, what do we use (1) to mean?
Answer: (1) is used to mean, for some location l, that it is raining at l. If l is a constituent of
what is meant by (1), then it is an unarticulated one. And I’m inclined to think that there is
nothing in the sentence that it is used to mean it (so it is unarticulated in Perry’s strong sense).
C&L: what it means is that it is raining – a location neutral proposition. I don’t think that this
is the whole story.
What about (2)? What is (2) used to mean? It is not the case that (1) is used to mean, for some
location l, that Nina danced at l last night. So there is a difference between the two.
Why the difference? Not because rain necessarily happens in a location whereas dancing does
not (that is false). Just because of contingent facts about what (1) and (2) are used to mean.
These might be explainable in terms of what we are interested in (our interests in rain are
location-focused). But that is not the primary explanation.
These facts about usage of (1) and (2) are contingent. (1) need not be used to mean this – it
may be used to mean that it is raining somewhere, or just that it is raining. And (2) may be
used to mean, for some location l, that Nina danced at l last night. But in actual fact that is not
how they happen to be (generally used).
We can even imagine a situation in which these facts about (1) and (2) are exactly reversed.
I disagree with C&L that what (1) means is a location neutral proposition.
I agree (I think!) that there is a non-localised proposition that it is raining.
(1)
(2)
(3)
It is raining.
Nina danced last night.
Steel isn’t strong enough.
What does (1) semantically express on an occasion of use (what is its semantic content)? That
is, what does (1) mean? That is, what do we use (1) to mean?
Answer: (1) is used to mean, for some location l, that it is raining at l. If l is a constituent of
what is meant by (1), then it is an unarticulated one. And I’m inclined to think that there is
nothing in the sentence that it is used to mean it (so it is unarticulated in Perry’s strong sense).
C&L: what it means is that it is raining – a location neutral proposition. I don’t think that this
is the whole story.
What about (2)? What is (2) used to mean? It is not the case that (1) is used to mean, for some
location l, that Nina danced at l last night. So there is a difference between the two.
Why the difference? Not because rain necessarily happens in a location whereas dancing does
not (that is false). Just because of contingent facts about what (1) and (2) are used to mean.
These might be explainable in terms of what we are interested in (our interests in rain are
location-focused). But that is not the primary explanation.
These facts about usage of (1) and (2) are contingent. (1) need not be used to mean this – it
may be used to mean that it is raining somewhere, or just that it is raining. And (2) may be
used to mean, for some location l, that Nina danced at l last night. But in actual fact that is not
how they happen to be (generally used).
We can even imagine a situation in which these facts about (1) and (2) are exactly reversed.
I disagree with C&L that what (1) means is a location neutral proposition.
I agree (I think!) that there is a non-localised proposition that it is raining.
Semantics versus pragmatics
I have three children.
Might be used to mean that I have at least three children, or that I have exactly three children.
I’m inclined to think that the sentence doesn’t mean that I have at least three children, but that
what it means is true iff I have at least three children.
Mary took out her key and opened the door.
I am parked out back.
The ham sandwich left without paying.
The ATM swallowed my credit card.
Six men wrote two songs.
‘He believes that I am tall’. Can we use ‘I’ here to refer to him? Perhaps to mean the way that
he thinks about himself?
What is it to be a powerful objection?
Any proposition that is meant can be evaluated for truth and falsity, not just what is said.
What we say
Question: what kinds of things are they that we say? I suggest: individuals, properties,
relations and their combinations.
Maybe what we say by uttering a sentence is a constraint on interpretation: it is a thing that
constrains the range of propositions that I can be interpreted to mean. Maybe can take it to be
a set of propositions. What did you say? What constraint did you just impose? Can impose the
same constraint using sentences with different meanings. The meaning of a sentence is a way
of imposing a constraint. We don’t use sentences to express propositions, but to impose
constraints on interpretation of what we mean (which might be a proposition), and it might be
such that it constrains us to just one interpretation (just one proposition).
I utter ‘John has finished’. This allows being interpreted as meaning that John has finished,
but not that John has bought a car.
(*)
A: I am hungry
B: A said that she is hungry.
‘I’ in A’s mouth places the same constraint on interpretation as ‘she’ in B’s mouth. Note: to
report what someone says do not have to preserve meaning. Just have to preserve constraints.
And do not have to preserve proposition expressed, because might not be such a thing. And
should not preserve the proposition meant, because there is no such commitment in what is
said.
B must report the constraint that A has placed on interpretation. Maybe this: what A said
determines a set of propositions, and to report what A said B must say something that
determines the same set of propositions.
(*)
A: Who did this?
B: John.
A: You’re wrong: John didn’t do this.
B: I didn’t say that he did.
A: Maybe not, but that’s what you meant.
(*)
A: Who did this?
B: John.
C: *B said that John.
C: B said that John did this. (is this true?)
Maybe what is going on here is this: B uses an elliptical sentence (not a complete sentence),
and so can’t grammatically report what he said using indirect speech. Maybe in ‘A said that
S’, S must be a grammatical sentence.
Do (*a) and (*b) say the same thing? Do they have the same meaning?
(*)
a.
b.
A:
B:
A:
John hit Mary.
Mary was hit by John.
Joe said that Mary was hit by John.
No, Joe said that John hit Mary.
Same thing.
Constraints on interpretation: syntactic, semantic, conventional, pragmatic.
I’m thirsty. Yeah, I’ve been dying to quench mine.
Shall I give them an ask?
Who was the doer?
We isolated the smell, and then we ate it. (Crossy)
‘exult’.
He was exultant. *He exulted.
John thinks it’s good to eat vegetables.
Shannon believes it is good to eat fish.
The chicken is ready to eat.
The best way to remove peanut butter from your balls is a dog.
It’ll be a bit hard when she gives birth overseas.
Meaning: It’ll be a bit hard when she gives birth while I’m overseas.
New punctuation marks: lamentation mark, approval mark, disapproval mark.
What do you think of the following word?:
‘hello’
The Oxford comma:
I like the following sandwiches:
Cheese, tomato and egg and bacon.
Ambiguous between: cheese, tomato, and egg and bacon; cheese, tomato and egg, and bacon.
‘You won’t taste what’s missing’. A sense in which this is trivially true, and a sense in which
it is not.
Kinds
Water is not a kind. It is a kind of stuff, but that does not mean that it is a kind. Ofra is a kind
of human (a woman), but she is not a kind. She is a human of a certain kind. Water is stuff of
a certain kind.