Identical Sentences Research Articles

On Restricting Rigidity

In this note I revive a lingering (albeit dormant) account of rigid designation from the pages of Mind with the aim of laying it to rest. Why let a sleeping dog lie when you can put it down? Andre Gallois (1986) has proposed an account of rigid designators that allegedly squares with Saul Kripke's (1980) characterisation of them as terms which designate the same object in all possible worlds, but on which, contra Kripke, identity sentences involving rigid designators may be merely contingently true. This suits Gallois, as he finds the notion of contingent identity coherent. Thus, the thrust of Gallois' thesis is that his account of rigidity is preferable to Kripke's because his accommodates a coherent metaphysical viewpoint, whereas Kripke's doesn't. Gallois has thwarted one unconvincing challenge (see Carter 1987; Gallois 1988) and his account, as yet, remains untainted. But not for long, I hope.' Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the notion of contingent identity is coherent, that, in other words, it makes-or can make-sense to say that certain (possible) objects are identical in one world but distinct in another. What I shall argue here is that Gallois' account of rigidity would prevent us from expressing the contingent non-identity of objects; if so, this is a significant failing of the account, for, as will emerge, clearly Gallois is committed to the contingency of non-identity. Here's a brief outline of Gallois' position. He revives a familiar scenario involving the identity of ships. We are asked to consider a world W in which a ship designated undergoes gradual plank replacement so that what eventually emerges is a ship made from a collection of planks, Cl, that has no members in common with the original collection of planks, C, that made up Mary. The resulting ship is christened in W. We are then asked to consider a possible world WI which contains two ships: Mary,, made up of planks from C (arranged in the same way as when they constituted Mary in W) and Alice,, made up of planks from C1 (arranged in the same way as when they constituted Alice in W). Now, Gallois says:

Vague Identity and Vague Objects

In this paper, I want to argue-with certain qualifications-that there cannot be any vague identities, and to outline reasons for scepticism about the view that the world contains vague objects. I also argue that, even if there were vague identities, this would lend no support to the vague-objects view. 1. What would constitute a defence of the vague-identity thesis? It would be an example in which a sentence of numerical identity is indeterminate in truth-value (i.e., neither true nor false), where the indeterminacy is due to vagueness. (Thus we are not concerned with identity sentences whose indeterminacy is due, e.g., to referencefailure or to cross-category identification.) It seems clear that there are such examples: where the vagueness of an identity is a consequence of the vagueness of one or both of its singular terms. For example, the singular term 'the world's greatest ruler' is vague because of the vagueness of the predicate '. . . great ruler'. This predicate is vague, not because it lacks sharp boundaries, but because of its multi-criterial application conditions. Many different factors contribute to the greatness of a ruler-wisdom, fortitude, diplomacy, prudence, etc.,-and the rules of our language do not fix in advance what weight to assign to each factor. Because of this vagueness, the singular term 'the world's greatest ruler' has no determinate reference: it is vague which person it singles out. (Though, as Wiggins has emphasised, from the fact that it is vague which object a term singles out, it does not follow that it singles out something vague.)' Consequently, an utterance of, e.g., 'the world's greatest ruler was the world's wisest ruler' is a plausible example of a vague identity.2

How not to become a Millian heir

Millianism is a highly contentious doctrine in the theory of meaning. It is the thesis that the contribution made by an ordinary proper name to securing the information content of, or the proposition expressed by, a declarative sentence in which the name occurs (outside of the scope of such nonextensional operators as quotation marks), as the sentence is used in a possible context, is simply the name's referent (bearer) in the given use.' The unpopularity of the doctrine stems heavily perhaps primarily from the fact that it leads to a serious philosophical difficulty discovered by Gottlob Frege, and which I have dubbed 'Frege's Puzzle': Let a and b be distinct but co-referential proper names such that the identity sentence 'a = b' contains information that is knowable only a posteriori, and can therefore be informative. Then how can this sentence 'a = b' differ at all in cognitive information (propositional) content from ra = a', which is a priori and uninformative? In Frege's Puzzle2 I proposed an analysis according to which the puzzle relies on three components: (i) a compositionality principle that propositions formed in the very same way from the very same components are the very same proposition; (ii) the principle, which I call 'Frege's Law', that declarative sentences sharing the same cognitive information (propositional) content do not differ in informativeness or epistemological status; and (iii) the observation that there are coreferential proper names a and b (for example, 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus') such that ra = b' is informative and a posteriori even though ra = a' is always uninformative and a priori. Together these assertions comprise the main premises of a powerful argument against Millianism. Most Millians, if forced to give direct response, would probably reject Frege's Law. And taken in one sense, I would agree. I argued, however,

Stress clash in isolated phrases and sentence contexts

The experiment reported in this paper investigates the possibility that stress clash should be called “accent clash.” Stress clash in the phonological literature has been defined in terms of lexically specified stresses, while experimental investigation of such stress clash candidates has given a mixed picture as regards any phonetic effect of adjacent lexical stresses. The hypothesis was that lexical stress defines the candidates for a clash and that the placement of accents during production determines whether a clash will actually occur. To test this, subjects' productions of pairs of adjective noun phrases that contrasted stress clash versus no stress clash environments (big dinosaur/big dimension) were analyzed. These phrases were recorded both in isolation and within syntactically identical sentence environments. This manipulation was used to elicit two types of accent patterns; in isolation, both the adjective and noun received intonational accent, while in context, only the noun was accented. The results of a pilot experiment have suggested that, for phrases of this type, there is a difference in the durational effect of stress clash (duration of the adjective) when items are produced in isolation versus when they are produced in sentence contexts. The relevance of these data for current phonological theory will be discussed. [Work supported by NIH Research Grant NS‐12179 to Indiana University.]

Do segmental attributes distinguish spontaneous and prepared speech

A set of perceptual studies was conducted to assess the salience of segmental phonetic differences between spontaneous and prepared speech. Prior studies employing our perceptual paradigm revealed that naive listeners can differentiate lexically, syntactically, and thematically identical sentence pairs that have been extracted from brief monologs (> 40 s), identifying the spontaneously uttered version at high levels of performance. No single acoustic attribute appears to predict the perceptual salience of spontaneity in production, though the variability of f0 as the sentence ends and the average duration of syllables are both correlated with the detection of spontaneity. The present investigation exploits the perceptual differentiation test to determine the salience of segmental differences between spontaneous and prepared utterances. Against the benchmark of differentiability of intact sentence pairs, the perceptual distinctiveness of spontaneous and read utterances was evaluated by deleting the segmental information alone by low-pass filtering. In additional converging tests, versions of the sentence pairs without formant variation were synthesized, setting the spectrum to the vowel [ɑ], while preserving natural differences in duration and f0; and, synthetic sentence pairs lacking variation in f0 were tested in filtered and [ɑ] versions. The results will be discussed in reference to the perceptual constraints on the comprehension of spontaneous speech. [Research supported by grants from NINCDS and NICHHD.]

Carter on Contingent Identity and Rigid Designation

In a paper entitled 'Rigid Designation and the Contingency of Identity' I stated a condition for a designator to designate rigidly, and made the following claims about it.1 First, the condition in question, referred to as RDC, is extensionally adequate. No designator conforming to it intuitively fails to be rigid, and no designator failing to conform to it intuitively qualifies as rigid. Second, an identity sentence incorporating only designators satisfying RDC could be contingently true. Hence, if proper names need only satisfy RDC to qualify as rigid designators an identity sentence containing only proper names could be contingently true. Apart from making these claims on behalf of RDC I described a candidate example of a contingent identity which I will call the case of the ships. The case of the ships features the ships Mary, Alice, Mary1, and Alice1. Mary and Alice are located in possible world W, and Mary1 and Alice1 are located in world W1. In W Mary is originally constructed from the members of a plank collection C, and Alice eventuates from Mary by a gradual but complete identity-preserving replacement of the members of C with the members of the non-overlapping plank collection C1. In W1 Mary1 is originally constituted from the members of C, and Alice1 is originally constituted from the members of C1. I contended that there is something to be said for taking Mary to be identical to Mary1 in W, and something to be said for taking Alice to be identical with Alice1 in W. Mary and Mary1 are originally identically constituted, and Alice and Alice1 are identically constituted from much of their careers. However, if Mary is identical with Mary1 in W, and Alice is identical with Alice1 in W then, by the transitivity of identity, Mary1 is identical with Alice1 in W. Hence, Mary1 is identical with Alice1 in W, and Mary1 is non-identical with Alice1 in W1. So Mary1 is contingently identical with Alice1. In 'Contingent Identity and Rigid Designation' William R. Carter challenges the extensional adequacy of RDC.2 In addition, Carter disputes that the case of the ships can be plausibly thought of as a contingent identity on the following grounds. Carter contends that the most satisfactory solution to the problem posed by the case of the ships implies no contingent identity. In addition, he constructs a dilemma for anyone who takes the case of the ships to be an example of a contingent identity. According to Carter the case of the ships raises certain transworld identity questions, and on any resolution of them, turns out not to be a case of a contingent identity. I will begin this reply by considering Carter's criticism of RDC. In 'Rigid Designation and the Contingency of Identity' RDC was stated as follows:

Belief, Linguistic Behavior, and Propositional Content

In this paper, I present solutions to four related problems for the Millian Theory of the meaning of proper names. These solutions are based on a new view about the connections among belief, linguistic behavior and propositional content, and on a hypothesis about the kinds of beliefs we reason from when we reason from our beliefs. In section I, I state several assumptions that guide this effort. In section II, I present three rival views about the connections among belief, linguistic behavior and propositional content. In section III, I review the four problems to be solved: the problem of significant (or non-trivial) true, identity sentences; the problem of apparent failures of the substitutivity of codesignating names in propositional attitude contexts; and two problems raised by Kripke's puzzle about belief.' In section IV, I state and explain my hypothesis about the kinds of beliefs we reason from when we reason from our beliefs. In section V, I present solutions to the four problems.

Related intuitions and the mental representation of causative verbs in adults and children

Several lines of investigation refute the empirical basis for previous claims that experiments on subjective word relatedness demonstrate the psychological unreality of decompositional semantic representations for lexical causatives. Using three different techniques, we show that perceived relatedness between words is not a function of their structural distance at different levels of linguistic representation. Therefore, relatedness intuitions cannot be used as a critical test of the relative structural complexity of underlying syntactic or semantic representations. In contrast, subjective relatedness between nouns of structurally identical sentences are clearly affected by aspects of their conceptual interpretation, such as the ‘definiteness’ and ‘concreteness’ of the denoted entities, the intensity of their ‘intentional interaction’, or the ‘directness of causation’ expressed. The meaning of lexical causatives cannot be accounted for in terms of a prototype concept of direct causation. The prototype theory generates wrong predictions about the referential use of causative verbs in adults. It also fails to account for facts in the acquisition of lexical causatives. There is a stage of broad causative generalization when the use of both existing and novel causative verbs is extended to non-prototypical as well as prototypical causative events. We propose a bi-level lexical representation of causative verbs, which consists of (i) a decompositional — but non -definitional — semantic representation articulating their causative status, and (ii) a contextually attached conceptual stereotype specifying their range of application as a function of their context of use. The decomposable semantic structure emerges as a developmental stage in the acquisition of lexical concepts as a result of the linguistic reorganization of the lexicon. The conceptual stereotype becomes embedded later as part of the representation available in the mental lexicon for access by adults.

Rigid Designation and the Contingency of Identity

As is well known Saul Kripke believes that identities hold of necessity.' That is, if a is identical with b then a is identical with b in any possible world in which either a or b exists. This metaphysical thesis is, in Kripke's view, supported by the linguistic thesis that certain terms, notably proper names, function as rigid designators. More precisely, if 'a' and 'b' are rigid designators then the identity sentence 'a = b' is, if true, necessarily true. *Let us call this thesis the rigid designation thesis. The main argument for the rigid designation thesis is set forth by Susan Haak in her book Philosophy of Logics:

Sentence intonation in spontaneous utterances and fluently spoken text

What is the relationship between syntactic constituent structure and the intonation of a sentence? Psycholinguistic answers have varied, some viewing intonation as a close derivative of syntactic composition. The present study of this issue compared F0 and perceptual attributes of a number of syntactically and lexically identical sentence pairs. In each pair produced by a single talker, each sentence had the same pragmatic, thematic, and semantic function within a larger monologue of at least 40‐s duration, but one member had been produced spontaneously, and the other was read from a text prepared from the spontaneous corpus. Our linguistic results of the comparison of two kinds of fluent speech are discussed in terms of intonation in reading and spontaneous speech, as well as in terms of the phonological control of intonation. Our perceptual results are discussed with respect to the listener's sensitivity to the spontaneous/read distinction, and the implications for the potential contribution of intonation to sentence perception.

Word recognition in a foreign language: a study of speech perception.

Models of speech perception have stressed the importance of investigating recognition of words in fluent speech. The effects of word length and the initial phonemes of words on the speech perception of foreign language learners were investigated. English-speaking subjects were asked to listen for target words in repeated presentations of a prose passage read in French by a native speaker. The four target words were either one or four syllables in length and began with either an initial stop or fricative consonant. Each of the four words was substituted 60 times in identical sentence contexts in place of nouns deleted from the original story. The results indicated that four-syllable words were more easily detected than one-syllable words. Contrary to expectation, stop-initial words were not more accurately detected than fricative-initial words. Based on these findings additional considerations that seem needed in order to apply current models of word recognition to naive listeners are discussed.

Determinants of the word-frequency effect in recognition memory.

Possible determinants of the word-frequency effect (WFE), that is, the finding that lowfrequency (LF) words are recognized more accurately than high-frequency (HF) words, are evaluated. Three studies examined the view that, since HF words have more meanings than LF words, it is less likely that the word sense tagged at time of presentation will be accessed at time of test and a correct response will be made. To ensure the same word sense was accessed at time of presentation and time of test in the case of both HF and LF words, sentence contexts used during presentation were combined with cuing procedures at time of test. Recognition performance improved, but the WFE was unaltered even when the identical sentence context was used during presentation and test. A fourth study considered GlarLzer and Bowles’ (19761 suggestion that associates of both HF and LF words tend to be HF words that are (1)likely to be activated and derivatively encoded during presentation and (2) likely to include a number of distractors from the recognition test sufficient to impair performance on HF words. Analysis of associative responses of subjects to HF and LF words, and the errors they made, support strongly such an interference-type interpretation of the WFE.

Transworld identity sentences

Transworld identity sentences

On the comprehension and production of pronouns

Four experiments investigated whether subjects understand the supposedly generic he generically. In Experiment I, subjects responded YES if an auditorily presented sentence could refer to a female and otherwise NO. Responses were 98% correct for sentences containing sex-specific nouns and pronouns, but 87% incorrect (i.e., NO) for sentences containing generic he . In Experiment II, subjects heard identical sentences but responded YES if the sentence could refer to a male. Responses were 99% correct, indicating high availability of the concept “male” for sentences containing generic he . In Experiment III, responses were 97% incorrect with she substituted for he in otherwise identical generic sentences. Experiment IV determined the effect of removing the pronouns from the sentences. The results inspired a general model of processes underlying the comprehension and production of pronouns.

Spacing and the retention of synonyms

Two experiments investigated the retention of word pairs as a joint function of synonymity and of Word 1/Word 2 spacings. Word 1 and Word 2 were adjectives or adverbs, presented in identical sentence contexts, for either intentional (Experiment 1) or incidental (Experiment 2) learning. In both experiments, it was found that as the spacing between the first and second members of the high-similarity pairs increased, recognition of the word pairs decreased (i.e., a reverse spacing effect). For low-similarity pairs, only incidental learning instructions led to a reverse spacing effect. A positive, rather than reverse, spacing effect had been predicted for high-similarity word pairs. Implications of the unexpected finding are discussed.

Frequency Judgments for the 'Gist' of Sentences

The subjects were shown a series of sentences in which some sentences were repeated in either identical or paraphrased form and with 0, 4, or 8 sentences between repetitions. At test, frequency judgments were requested on the basis of either the exact wording or the underlying meaning, the gist, of the sentences. The results indicated that frequency can be indexed independently for both wording and meaning. A spacing effect was found for the judgments of repeated identical sentences but not for those of repeated gists of sentences.

The Reversion Theme in Current Okinawan Politics

Research Article| March 01 1967 The Reversion Theme in Current Okinawan Politics Mikio Higa Mikio Higa Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1938) 7 (3): 151–164. https://doi.org/10.2307/2642234 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mikio Higa; The Reversion Theme in Current Okinawan Politics. Far Eastern Survey 2 February 1938; 7 (3): 151–164. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2642234 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAsian Survey Search This content is only available via PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Grammatical structure and the immediate recall of english sentences

Various grammatical features of English sentences—negative and passive transformations, and others—are encoded in immediate memory apart from one another, and apart from the rest of the sentence. The evidence for this claim is that sentences having these features require a larger part of the capacity of immediate memory than do otherwise identical sentences lacking these same features. The amount of memory capacity required by each sentence was measured by seeing how much additional material could be remembered along with it.

Preference Scaling of Vocoder Speech

A study was performed to evaluate preferences for vocoder-processed speech. Tape recordings of conversational sentences were processed through five vocoders to provide stimulus materials. The method of pair comparisons was employed. Stimulus materials consisted of identical sentences. Each sentence was processed through a different vocoder. Distances between vocoders were calculated, using a more realistic statistical model that is different from those previously employed for purposes of evaluating communication systems. The arcsine transformation of observed preference percentages was used in conjunction with analysis of variance to derive scale values that more nearly satisfy the requirements of a psychological distance function. Data are presented for five vocoder designs. [The research reported in this paper was sponsored in part by the U. S. Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories, Office of Aerospace Research.]