Abstract
AbstractWe propose a new account of linguistic content that reconciles content-pluralism with compositionality. This is achieved by integrating truth-conditional content and attitude report content into a single notion of content. A parametrized version of this notion (with parameters for agents, times, and information states) serves as input to the compositional semantic machinery. By supplying different parameter-values to the parametrized contents of their complements, different verbs select for different components of the complement’s integrated content. The resulting account explains the different substitution properties of extensional and attitude constructions and captures the role of agents’ epistemicperspective in the determination of attitude content. The account improves upon other accounts of truth-conditional and attitude content (esp. two-dimensional semantics) by interpreting different occurrences of an expression—in extensional and in attitude embeddings—as objects of the same semantic type, and by explaining the substitution-resistance of attitudinal embeddings of extensional constructions.
Highlights
The notion of linguistic content lies at the core of research in semantics and the philosophy of language
Many semantic theories today adopt some form of pluralism about linguistic content
To explain the substitution behavior of attitude reports (see (3)), most theories of two-dimensional semantics (e.g. Lerner and Zimmermann 1991; Haas-Spohn 1995; Schlenker 2003) treat proper names and kind terms as indexical expressions whose truth-conditional content is determined by the utterance context
Summary
The notion of linguistic content lies at the core of research in semantics and the philosophy of language. This notion describes the context-dependent meaning of (utterances of) linguistic expressions that is used to capture the truth-conditional contribution of these expressions and to predict the entailment relations between these expressions (see Lewis 1970; Montague 1970). Many semantic theories today adopt some form of pluralism about linguistic content
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