What is wrong with unarticulated constituents?

• Authors: Marián Zouhar
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

It is quite popular nowadays to postulate various kinds of unarticulated constituents that have essential bearing on truth conditions of utterances. F. Recanati champions an elaborated version of contextualism according to which one has to distinguish two kinds of unarticulated constituents: those that are articulated at the level of the logical form of a given sentence and those that are truly unarticulated. Recanati offers a theory which explains the manner of incorporating truly unarticulated constituents into the propositions expressed. This theory invokes variadic functions. The present paper shows that variadic functions are unnecessary because no constituents are truly unarticulated in the sense assumed by Recanati. An alternative explanation is offered according to which all propositional constituents are either explicitly or implicitly represented at the syntactic level.

Keywords

EN

adicity; free enrichment; saturation; unarticulated constituent; variadic function

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human Affairs
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 21
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 239-248

Dates

published

2011-09-01

online

2011-09-22

Contributors

author

Marián Zouhar

• Slovak Academy of Sciences

References

• [1] Bach, K. (1994). Conversational Impliciture. Mind and Language 9, 124–162. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0017.1994.tb00220.x[Crossref]
• [2] Bach, K. (2001). You Don’t Say? Synthese 128, 15–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1010353722852[Crossref]
• [3] Cappelen, H., Lepore, E. (2005). Insensitive Semantics: A Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism. Oxford: Blackwell.
• [4] Martí, L. (2006). Unarticulated Constituents Revisited. Linguistics and Philosophy 29, 135–166. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10988-005-4740-4[Crossref]
• [5] Perry, J. (1986). Thoughts without Representation. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 60, 137–152.
• [6] Recanati, F. (2001). What is Said. Synthese 128, 75–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1010383405105[Crossref]
• [7] Recanati, F. (2002). Unarticulated Constituents. Linguistics and Philosophy 25, 299–345. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1015267930510[Crossref]
• [8] Recanati, F. (2004). Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• [9] Recanati, F. (2007). It is Raining (Somewhere). Linguistics and Philosophy 30, 123–146. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10988-006-9007-1[Crossref][WoS]

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/s13374-011-0025-5