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 n-tuple 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. The structure of the verb phrase. Arguments. Adjuncts. Theta-roles.
6. C-command.
7. Raising constructions: subject-to-subject, subject-to-object, passivisation.
8. Control constructions.
9. 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 / Not homographsHomophones / ‘bank’, ‘bank’ / ‘peak’, ‘peek’
Not homophones / ‘desert’, ‘desert’ / ‘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. I am a citizen
c. The mayor is underpaid.
d. Most people think the mayor is underpaid.
e. John is ready to leave.
f. I haven’t drunk any wine.
g. The Russian voted for the Russian.
h. The (former) hostages were greeted at the White House.
i. 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.