Abstract
AbstractA defining assumption in the debate on contextual influences on truth‐conditional content is that such content is often incompletely determined by what is specified in linguistic form. The debate then turns on whether this is evidence for positing a more richly articulated logical form or else a pragmatic process of free enrichment that posits truly unarticulated constituents that are unspecified in linguistic form. Questioning this focus on semantics and pragmatics, this article focuses on the independent grammatical dimensions of the problem. Against the background of a principled account of the different ways in which the lexicon and the grammar, respectively, determine aspects of propositional meaning, and an uncontentious notion of content, nothing turns out to be ‘missing’ in grammatical expressions in order for them to encode complete propositional thoughts. As this predicts, when putatively hidden constituents are made overt or are otherwise added, propositions result that are systematically different from the thoughts originally expressed. Context, while potentially affecting lexically specified aspects of meaning, never affects grammar‐determined ones, suggesting a specific role for grammar in the normal cognitive mode.
Highlights
A defining assumption in the recent debate on the influences of extra-linguistic context on the truth-conditional content of utterances is that this content is often incompletely determined by what is overtly specified in linguistic form
I will offer a diagnosis of what exactly makes the thought expressed in (8) different from the one expressed in (9), though the claim is that both are complete as well as propositional. For it remains at least an option, and an attractive one, that the thought expressed in (8) is, exactly the one that (8) fully specifies in its lexical and grammatical structure: stronger evidence than we have seen so far is needed to diverge from this best-case scenario: grammar-meaning alignment. This preliminary conclusion speaks against the semanticist’s contention that hidden constituents exist in (8) at some level of ‘logical form’, but against the pragmatist as well, insofar as the latter maintains that contexts exist in which unarticulated constituents may need to be contributed to (8), viewed as incomplete in propositional meaning without them
If the grammar is right, the referential act is performed: at the level of complete sentences, the truth-conditions are fixed and the proposition is complete, providing a basis for implicatures and further reasoning. On this view, and no identifiable ‘sentence’ in the Language of Thought, if there is one, describes the thought expressed better than what is uttered. Let us in this light look at a final challenge, which has been taken to suggest that meaning as established at the grammar-meaning interface need not be propositional and is in need of complementation by further structure, whether in logical form or in extra-linguistic representations (Stainton, 2006). (36) in particular is taken to support the view that in many utterances that we find natural, full propositions are expressed, nothing in the linguistic structure of the utterance indicates the presence of constituents that have to be added in order to make the propositions in question complete: 23 Récanati (2004, pp. 60–1) notes that a speaker asserting (33) does not assert the ‘minimal proposition’ that the ‘sandwich itself’ wants the bill
Summary
A defining assumption in the recent debate on the influences of extra-linguistic context on the truth-conditional content of utterances is that this content is often incompletely determined by what is overtly specified in linguistic form. The semantic strategy makes no empirical predictions for where and whether context impacts on truth conditional content, irrespective of linguistic form To illustrate this methodological problem, consider the claim that the utterance ‘It’s raining’ can sometimes have the ‘indefinite existential’ interpretation (‘it is raining somewhere’), and that the utterance ‘He is eating’ can have a ‘specific’ reading Such evidence is available where hidden constituents are currently posited in linguistic theory, such as the omitted subject-argument of win in a control construction like John wants to win the race, where this argument necessarily co-refers with John (who wants himself to win), or the trace of the wh-expression who in I wonder who John wants to win the race, where the subject of win crucially need not be John In such cases general principles of syntactic computation and movement explain the semantic facts in question
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