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Intensionality and coercion
- 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 97-122
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Summary
Abstract. Frege informally characterized intension or Sinn as Art des Gegebenseins, that is, ‘mode of presentation’ of an object or event. The linguistic phenomenon of coercion, as exemplified by the shift in aspectual class of the verb ‘love’ from state in (a) to activity in (c):
(a) I love her.
(b) * I am loving her.
(c) I am loving her more and more every day, the more I get to know her.
thus falls in the domain of intensional phenomena. We present a fully computational theory of aspectual coercion, based on the event calculus of Aritificial Intelligence, as reformulated in constraint logic programming. The cognitive background of this formalism, as well as other applications to tense and aspect, can be found in the authors’ The Proper Treatment of Events (Blackwell 2004).
Aspectual coercion as an intensional phenomenon. Ever since Vendler's famous classification of verbs with respect to their time schemata, linguists have distinguished at least four aspectual classes or Aktionsarten. These classes comprise states, activities, accomplishments, achievements and points, which are exemplified in (1) to (5).
(1) States: know, love, be beautiful.
(2) Activities: run, push a cart, draw.
(3) Accomplishments: cross the street, build a house, draw a letter.
(4) Achievements: begin, reach, arrive.
(5) Points: flash, spot, blink.
Several linguistic tests were developed to distinguish aspectual classes. For example, adverbial modification with for two hours is possible with activities (John ran for two hours) but not with accomplishments (*John built a house for two years) or achievements. Temporal modification with the adverbial in two hours shows the reverse pattern. Usually only activities and accomplishments can occur in the progressive. Expressions like *knowing the answer are ungrammatical. But there is also a crucial difference in the behaviour of activities and accomplishments with respect to their progressivised forms. From John was pushing a cart we can infer that John pushed a cart. However, the inference from John was crossing the street to John crossed the street is invalid. This phenomenon was dubbed the “imperfective paradox” by Dowty.
Moschovakis's notion of meaning as applied to linguistics
- from ARTICLES
- Edited by Matthias Baaz, Technische Universität Wien, Austria, Sy-David Friedman, Jan Krajíček, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague
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- Book:
- Logic Colloquium '01
- Published online:
- 31 March 2017
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- 02 March 2005, pp 255-280
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Summary
Wenn man nicht weiß was man selber will,muß man zuerst wissen was die anderen wollen.
General Stumm von Bordwehr§1. Introduction: Moschovakis's approach to intensionality. G. Frege introduced two concepts which are central tomodern formal approaches to natural language semantics; i.e., the notion of reference (denotation, extension, Bedeutung) and sense (intension, Sinn) of proper names2. The sense of a proper name is wherin the mode of presentation (of the denotation) is contained. For Frege proper names include not only expressions such as Peter, Shakespeare but also definite descriptions like the point of intersection of line l1 and l2 and furthermore sentences which are names for truth values. Sentences denote the True or the False. The sense of a sentence is the proposition (Gedanke) the sentence expresses. In the tradition of possible world semantics the proposition a sentence expresses ismodelled via the set ofworlds in which the sentence is true. This strategy leads to well known problems with propositional attitudes and other intensional constructions in natural languages since it predicts for example that the sentences in (1) are equivalent.
(1) a. Jacob knows that the square root of four equals two.
b. Jacob knows that any group G is isomorphic to a transformation group.
Even an example as simple as (1) shows that the standard concept of proposition in possible world semantics is not a faithful reconstruction of Frege's notion sense.
Frege developed his notion of sense for two related but conceptually different reasons. We already introduced the first one by considering propositional attitudes. The problem here is how to develop a general concept which can handle the semantics of Frege's ungerade Rede. The second problem is how to distinguish a statement like a = a which is rather uninformative from the informative statement a = b or phrased differently how to account for the semantic difference between (2-a) and (2-b).
(2) a. Scott is Scott.
b. Scott is the author ofWaverly.
Frege's intuitive concept of sense therefore was meant both to model information and provide denotations for intensional constructions.
[12] develops a formal analysis of sense and denotation which is certainly closer to Frege's intentions than is possible world semantics. Moschovakis's motivations are (at least) twofold. The first motivation is to give a rigorous definition of the concept algorithm [13] and thereby provide the basics for a mathematical theory of algorithms.