The Story So Far 7/18/17
Acount of Meaning in Natural Language • Conventional, construed as knowledge of language • Always connected to understanding in context • Compositionality • Truth-condition (inference, contradiction) • Represents Ambiguity • Vs. Vagueness, indexicality • Driven to resolve in context
Methodological Use of Logic • Formal language: well-defined, interpreted • Model-theoretic (aboutness) • Truth-conditional (connection to intuitions) • A foil to NL • Non-immaculate translation • Syntax-semantics interface as translation • Direct interpretation (NL as a FL)
Doing Semantics • Building and interpreting alternative formal languages • Understanding frameworks relating NL structures to logic • Understanding frameworks relating NL intuitions to logic • Evalute what the fit-gap tells us about NL • In particular constructions • In particular languages • In NL more generally
This Week From Predicates to Arguments • Predicates as unsaturated propositions • “Logical form” of eventuality descriptions • Relating argument phrases to entities • Names • Definite descriptions • Indefinite descriptions • Quantification
How far can we get with the idea that arguments are names that refer to entities? • Presumed to refer • Community-based familiarity • Uniqueness in context of use • Consider: John, Fido, Trump, the president • Consider: my dog, my father, my son, my friend
Is it entities that saturate the predicates? Substitutivity salva veritate
Some Classic Puzzles • The morning star and the evening star • The king of France • Smith’s murderer, and the man with the martini
Responses • Frege’s sense and reference ( Sinn und Bedeutung ) • Presupposition, truth-value gaps, and the constancy test • Semantic reference (denotation) vs. speaker’s meaning
Indefinite Descriptions • A student is ill. • A student is not ill. • Is a student ill? • Every student answered a question.
Two Basic Logical Quantifiers Expanding L1
Practice
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