3 results
6 - Reference
- from Part II - Theory of reference and quantification
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- By Paul Dekker, University of Amsterdam, Thomas Ede Zimmermann, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt
- Edited by Maria Aloni, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Paul Dekker, Universiteit van Amsterdam
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantics
- Published online:
- 05 July 2016
- Print publication:
- 07 July 2016, pp 173-205
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Summary
Introduction
Natural language is often used to say what the actual world is like, and we refer not only to this actual world but also to the things that we find in there, and that strike us as distinguished and relevant enough to talk about. All known languages have devices to refer to things in the world, our world, if you want. It seems to be a characteristic property of language that a special category of expressions serves especially this device of reference: names. This chapter is not on names though. It is on the role that reference plays according to prevailing theories of the meaning of natural language expressions, that is, in formal semantics.
We take it for granted that it is clear to the reader what we mean when we say things such as the following.
(1) The name “Barack Obama” refers to the current president of the United States, and the phrase “the name ‘Barack Obama’ ” has his name as its referent.
(2) When Wittgenstein referred to the author of the Tractatus he was referring to himself.
(3) The referent IM(a) of a proper name a in a model M is the individual in the domain of M assigned to a by the interpretation function IM of the model.
The word reference is taken here not as in a “reference manual”, in the “references section” of an article, or in the “professional references” in your CV, although the expressions are of course lexically related. Reference is considered from a linguistic perspective, as a phenomenon related to language.We will mostly speak of the reference of linguistic items, be they words, phrases, sentences, or uses or utterances thereof. Often it is associated with a specific syntactic category, that of noun phrases, or with a specific type of linguistic items, most particularly names and singular or plural nouns. The references of the expressions are taken to be individuals, objects, sets of objects, or any kind of things one can, indeed, refer to. The objects can be physical, perceptible objects, times, places, events, as well as abstract objects, imaginary objects, objects of any kind. Briefly, but not very informatively, we could say that objects thus conceived of can be anything one can refer to, or equivalently that anything one can refer to is an object.
Coercion vs. indeterminacy in opaque verbs
- Edited by Reinhard Kähle, Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal
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- Book:
- Intensionality
- Published online:
- 30 March 2017
- Print publication:
- 02 March 2005, pp 217-265
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Summary
Introduction. This paper is about the semantic analysis of opaque verbs such as seek and owe, which allow for unspecific readings of their indefinite objects. One may be looking for a good car without there being any car that one is looking for; or, one may be looking for a good car in that a specific car exists that one is looking for. It thus appears that there are two interpretations of these verbs—a specific and an unspecific one—and one may wonder how they are related. The present paper is a contribution to this question.
History
Paris. The time of the holy inquisition. Opaque verbs differ in their semantic behaviour from ordinary verbs. This phenomenon was already known to the medieval logician Buridanus:
I posit the case that for a good service you performed forme, I promised you a good horse. […] And since I owe you this, until I have paid that concerning the payment of which I have obligated myself […], you could rightly take action against me to bring about payment to you of a horse, which you could not do if I did not owe you. […] But the opposite is argued in a difficult way.
[Buridanus (1966 [1350]: 137)]The followingmodern version of the opposite argument is less verbose than the original:
Let us then have our horse-coper arguing again. “If I owe you a horse, then I owe you something. And if I owe you something, then there is something I owe you. And this can only be a thoroughbred of mine: you aren't going to say that in virtue of what I said there's something else I owe you. Very well, then: by your claim, there's one of my thoroughbreds I owe you. Please tell me which one it is.”
[Geach (1965: 430)]The two arguments are based on two different ways of reading the sentence under debate (1) — an obvious, unspecific interpretation and a somewhat remote, specific one.
Intensional logic and two-sorted type theory
- Thomas Ede Zimmermann
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- Journal:
- The Journal of Symbolic Logic / Volume 54 / Issue 1 / March 1989
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 12 March 2014, pp. 65-77
- Print publication:
- March 1989
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Among the symbolic languages used most frequently in the indirect interpretation of natural language are Montague's Intensional Logic IL [5, 384ff.] and its extensional counterpart, the language Ty2 of two-sorted type theory. The question of which of these two formal languages is to be preferred has been obscured by lack of knowledge about the exact relation between them. The present paper is an attempt to clarify the situation by showing that, modulo a small, decidable class of formulas irrelevant to these applications, IL and Ty2 are equivalent in the strong sense that there exists a reversible translation between the terms of either language.
In [3, 6Iff.] Gallin has shown that there exists a simple and natural translation * of IL into Ty2. Following Gallin's translation procedure, it is even possible to conceive of IL as a highly restricted sublanguage of Ty2, viz. as that part which only contains expressions of certain intensional types plus one variable of the basic type of indices or worlds. In an obvious sense, this sublanguage has less expressive power than the whole of Ty2, where it is possible to express conditions on entities that do not even exist in IL's ontology. However, by a certain amount of coding, one can translate Ty2 into IL [3, 105]. Conditions on nonintensional entities then become conditions on corresponding intensional objects; and these paraphrases preserve (standard) validity and entailment. On the other hand, this retranslation of Ty2 into IL is not an inversion of *, as can be seen from a simple example.