Abstract
Montague and Kaplan began a revolution in semantics,
which promised to explain how a univocal expression could make distinct
truth-conditional contributions in its various occurrences. The idea
was to treat context as a parameter at which a sentence is semantically
evaluated. But the revolution has stalled. One salient problem comes
from recurring demonstratives: “He is tall and he is not tall”. For the
sentence to be true at a context, each occurrence of the demonstrative
must make a different truth-conditional contribution. But this
difference cannot be accounted for by standard parameter sensitivity.
Semanticists, consoled by the thought that this ambiguity would
ultimately be needed anyhow to explain anaphora, have been too content
to posit massive ambiguities in demonstrative pronouns. This chapter
aims to revived the parameter revolution by showing how to treat
demonstrative pronouns as univocal while providing an account of
anaphora that doesn’t end up re-introducing the ambiguity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | The science of meaning |
| Subtitle of host publication | essays on the metatheory of natural language semantics |
| Editors | Derek Ball, Brian Rabern |
| Place of Publication | Oxford |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press |
| Chapter | 5 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9780191864100 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780198739548, 9780198865735 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2 Aug 2018 |