_In the normal course of events, children manifest linguistic competence equivalent to that of adults in just a few years. Children can produce and understand novel sentences, they can judge that certain strings of words are true or false, and so on. Yet experience appears to dramatically underdetermine the com- petence children so rapidly achieve, even given optimistic assumptions about children’s nonlinguistic capacities to extract information and form generalizations on the basis of statistical regularities in the input. These considerations underlie (...) various (more specific) poverty of stimulus arguments for the innate specification of linguistic principles. But in our view, certain features of nativist arguments have not yet been fully appreciated. We focus here on three (related) kinds of poverty of stimulus argument, each of which has been supported by the findings of psycholinguistic investigations of child language. (shrink)

This article explores the principles of interaction that shape grammatical practices of conversational speech cross-linguistically. Seven such principles are explored, and the grammatical practices they give rise to are illustrated. The role of these principles in shaping non-linguistic behavior is also touched on.

This study examines how second-language English learners' grammar issues differ in rural and urban Pakistani schools. This study is quasi-experimental. The study uses a quantitative approach and SPSS-analyzed writing test samples. The key findings reveal that pupils struggle to understand complicated syntactic structures like qualifiers, adjectives, adverbs, and adjunct and complement categories, even though they understand subject-verb agreement. Lack of resources and poor language education exacerbate these issues in rural areas. Teachers emphasize the need for the government to improve English (...) grammar education and the necessity for custom learning aids to help rural students with their particular issues in grammar and syntax. Teachers also want enhanced professional development to master advanced grammar teaching methods. Students expressed mixed confidence in their grammatical skills since they were unsure how well they comprehended complex grammar principles. To assist students in comprehending and using grammar rules, the study recommends adding more interactive and relevant grammar assignments to courses and using the process-genre technique. The results also demonstrate the need for teachers to continue to study and have support networks to ensure good language sessions. Policy suggestions include equipping schools, especially rural ones, modifying the curriculum, and funding teacher training. This study enhances Pakistani second language learners' academic and employment prospects by identifying grammar issues and providing writing tips. Thus, it expands ESL instruction. (shrink)

Schwarzschild (Nat Lang Semant 7:141–177, 1999)’s account of givenness elaborates a notion of complementarity of givenness and focus in an intricate way: while givenness is semantically interpreted, focus is grammatically marked. It has been noticed, however, that under certain circumstances givenness in English is grammatically marked as well. Movement plays a role in this process. This paper provides further evidence for givenness marking. I present a case study of three Slavic languages (Czech, Russian, and Serbo-Croatian) in which givenness is always (...) grammatically marked. In these languages, given elements must linearly precede new elements. If this relative ordering cannot be achieved by base generation, the ordering can be achieved by movement. I offer an account of the data in terms of givenness and the Maximize Presupposition principle of Heim (1991). In particular, I argue for an operator that marks elements in its scope as given. The operator divides the structure between a given and a new part. The role of Maximize Presupposition is to enforce that every given element is in the scope of the operator. The operator and Maximize Presupposition work in tandem with an economy condition on movement that licenses movement only if it yields an otherwise unavailable semantic interpretation. The proposal thus provides independent evidence for competition in grammar and for the role of Maximize Presupposition in the process. (shrink)

In relative clause extraposition (RCE) in English, a noun is modified by a non-adjacent RC, resulting in a discontinuous dependency, as in: Three people arrived here yesterday who were from Chicago. Although discourse focus is known to influence the choice of RCE over truth-conditionally equivalent sentences with canonical structure (Rochemont and Culicover, English focus constructions and the theory of grammar, Cambridge University Press, 1990; Takami, A functional constraint on Extraposition from NP, John Benjamins, 1999), Hawkins (Efficiency and complexity in grammars, (...) Oxford University Press, 2004) and Wasow (Postverbal behavior, CSLI Publications, 2002) have proposed in addition that RCE should be preferred when the relative clause is long (or ‘heavy’) relative to the VP because such structures are processed more efficiently in comprehension and production. The current study tested this hypothesis based on Hawkins' (Efficiency and complexity in grammars, Oxford University Press, 2004) domain minimization principles. In an acceptability judgment task, canonical sentences were rated significantly higher than extraposition sentences when the RC was light, but this difference disappeared when the RC was heavy. In a self-paced reading task, extraposition sentences were read significantly faster than canonical sentences when the RC was heavy, but there was no difference when the RC was light. In an analysis of RCE in the ICE-GB corpus, extraposed RCs were significantly longer than the VP on average, whereas canonical RCs were significantly shorter, and the proportion of sentences with extraposition decreased as the ratio of VP-to-RC length increased. These findings support Hawkins' (Efficiency and complexity in grammars, Oxford University Press, 2004) domain minimization principles and help explain why a discontinuous dependency is allowed and sometimes preferred even in a language with relatively fixed word order. (shrink)

The existence of “local implicatures” has been the topic of much recent debate. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this debate by asking what we can learn from three puzzles, namely, the cancellation of such implicatures by or both, their behavior in the complement clauses of negative factive verbs such as sorry, and their behavior in root and embedded questions. Two basic approaches to local implicatures have been advanced: a fully pragmatic account in which local implicatures result (...) from conventional Gricean principles and a semantic account according to which the generation of implicatures is interwoven with compositional, grammatical mechanisms. We argue that the lesson to be learned from our three case studies is that some kind of approach along the latter, grammatical line is necessary to account for the data. (shrink)

Approaching language change within a Darwinian framework constitutes a long-standing tradition within the literature of diachronic linguistics. However, many publications remain vague, omitting conceptual details or missing necessary terminology. For example, phylogenetic trees of language families are regularly compared to biological speciation, but definitions on mechanisms of inheritance, i.e. how linguistic information is transferred between individuals and cohorts, or on the linguistic correlates to genotype and phenotype are often missing or lacking. In light of this, Haider’s attempts to develop this (...) approach into a theoretically more precise position, closely mirroring principles of Darwinian natural selection in the dimension of diachronic grammatical change, but contrasting this with non-Darwinian lexical change. He draws a comparison to viral replication, essentially positing that grammar variants act as mental viruses, competing for replication in new hosts, i.e. children during critical periods of language acquisition. Haider proposes that in light of this competition for replication, the unconscious fixation of an individual’s grammar leads to diachronic grammatical change largely mirroring Darwinian natural selection. Despite the intuitive appeal this mode of reasoning may feature, the following response paper identifies and discusses a suit of shortcomings to this conceptualization. Some problems arise from underspecified theoretical notions, others due to the incomplete or inaccurate adoption of biological principles, and yet more through a partial incompatibility with empirical data. These criticisms do not amount to a dismissal of the Darwinian framework Haider is following, but to a rejection of Haider’s current position. Albeit it remains unclear if a truly Darwinian approach to language change can be reached, suggestions on how Haider’s theoretical notions could be further developed are made and pertinent efforts may ultimately lead to a productive theory. (shrink)

A central question in online human sentence comprehension is, “How are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence?” Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. This article argues that dependency resolution is mediated by cue‐based retrieval, constrained by independently motivated working memory principles defined in a cognitive architecture. To demonstrate this, this article investigates an unusual instance of dependency resolution, the processing of negative (...) and positive polarity items, and confirms a surprising prediction of the cue‐based retrieval model: Partial‐cue matches—which constitute a kind of similarity‐based interference—can give rise to the intrusion of ungrammatical retrieval candidates, leading to both processing slow‐downs and even errors of judgment that take the form of illusions of grammaticality in patently ungrammatical structures. A notable achievement is that good quantitative fits are achieved without adjusting the key model parameters. (shrink)

This paper investigates three morphosyntactic alternations in Estonian – those between the exterior locative cases allative, adessive and ablative and the corresponding postpositionspeale‘onto’,peal‘on’ andpealt‘off’. Based on the Complexity Principle (e.g., Rohdenburg, Günter. 2002. Processing complexity and the variable use of prepositions in English. In Hubert Cuyckens & Günter Radden (eds.),Perspectives on prepositions, 79–100. Tübingen: Niemeyer), we expect cognitively more complex constructions to use more explicit (i.e., morphologically more substantial) marking by means of a postposition. Further, we expect variation to (...) be conditioned similarly in all three semantic categories. For each of the three alternations, a random sample of the two outcomes (case vs. postposition) from the Estonian National Corpus is used, resulting in 3,000 data points. Using properties of the Landmark phrase as independent variables in Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression models, we predict the choice of postpositions over case-marked realisations. Of the patterns found, only the frequency-related one supports our complexity-related hypothesis. We conclude that the Complexity Principle, in its general form, has little explanatory power for the Estonian constructions at hand and, in particular, that the derived principle of ‘analytic support’ is not generally applicable. We show, however, that the grammatical knowledge of Estonian exterior locative cases and the corresponding postpositions is regulated by our three factors in a relatively uniform way. (shrink)

We study how people attend to and memorize endings of events that differ in the degree to which objects in them are affected by an action: Resultative events show objects that undergo a visually salient change in state during the course of the event (peeling a potato), and non‐resultative events involve objects that undergo no, or only partial state change (stirring in a pan). We investigate general cognitive principles, and potential language‐specific influences, in verbal and nonverbal event encoding and memory, (...) across two experiments with Dutch and Estonian participants. Estonian marks a viewer's perspective on an event's result obligatorily via grammatical case on direct object nouns: Objects undergoing a partial/full change in state in an event are marked with partitive/accusative case, respectively. Therefore, we hypothesized increased saliency of object states and event results in Estonian speakers, as compared to speakers of Dutch. Findings show (a) a general cognitive principle of attending carefully to endings of resultative events, implying cognitive saliency of object states in event processing; (b) a language‐specific boost on attention and memory of event results under verbal task demands in Estonian speakers. Results are discussed in relation to theories of event cognition, linguistic relativity, and thinking for speaking. (shrink)

This article presents a Whig history of Minimalism, suggesting that it is the natural next step in the generative program initiated in the mid 1950s. The program so conceived has two prongs: (i) unifying the disparate modules by demonstrating that they are generated by the same basic operations and respect the same general conditions and (ii) assessing which of these basic operations and conditions are parochial to the faculty of language (FL) and which are reflect more general features of cognitive (...) computation. What makes Minimalism ‘minimal’ is the conviction that the bulk of the operations and principles in FL are proprietary to that cognitive module. The article illustrates the aims of the project by discussing some ways of reducing Binding Theory to the theory of Movement. (shrink)

The main designs of modern theories of syntax assume a process of syntagmatic organization. However, research on first language acquisition leaves no doubt that the structured combination of single lexical items cannot begin until a critical mass of lexical items has been acquired such that the lexicon is structured hierarchically on the basis of hierarchical feature bundling. Independent of a decision between the main views about the design of a proto language (the grammarless “Holophrastic view”,Arbib & Bickerton 2010: 1,Bickerton 2014) (...) or the ‘Compositional View’ as taken byRizzi (2010),Carstairs-McCarthy (2010), and others. What seems to be the minimal offset for language is the existence of grammatical categories like verb and noun, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, functional categories as needed for the expression of all kinds of agreement between the distinct categories to form recursively structured complexes. I follow the different stages of complexification asking whether there is paradigmatic next to syntagmatic organization and what its added value is for the evolution of grammar. The conclusion will be that paradigmatics is an indismissible part of the organization of early language in that it structures the lexicon so as to make primary and secondary syntactic merge possible and, consequently, is also a prerequisite for movement. The guiding idea of this position is Roman Jakobson’s insistence on the twofold organization of language and grammar. The two organizational designs, syntagmatics and paradigmatics, are manifest within each module: in the phonetic, the morphological, the syntactic, the semantic, and the pragmatic form (consider Jakobson’s1971a,breiterated argument). (shrink)

P¯an.ini’s grammar includes several types of metarules which determine how its operational rules apply. Among them are “traffic rules” which constrain how rules interact with each other in grammatical derivations. These are typically formulated as designating a rule or class of rules asiddha “not effected” (or asiddhavat “as if not effected”) with respect to another rule or class of rules. For economy, the rules so designated are grouped into several sections, whose headings collectively declare them to be asiddha(vat). The (...) biggest such section, under the famous heading 8.2.1 p ¯urvatr¯asiddham, extends from 8.2.1 through the end of the grammar (8.4.68), and is hence called the Trip¯ad¯ı ‘Three Sections’. (shrink)

Word order variation in Mandarin Chinese results in two constructions consisting of a noun phrase, a cluster of a demonstrative and a classifier, and a relative clause : the OMN with the RC+DM+NP order and the IMN with DM+RC+NP order. This study used corpus data to show correlational patterns of constructional choices. Specifically, OMN is associated with new and inanimate NPs serving the grammatical role of object in the relative clause that serves the discourse function of identification. By contrast, (...) for IMN, the head NP tends to carry given information, tends to be an animate entity, tends to serve the grammatical role of subject in the relative clause, and tends to have an RC that serves the discourse function of characterization. We suggest that the usage patterns can be interpreted in terms of the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance. (shrink)

The article analyzes the aspect of the subject-predicative relationship, the actualization of which is superficially associated with the development of analytical philosophy in the West. This question has an important philosophical deepening (from grammar through logic to ontology) also in the history of Indian thought. In particular, the Sanskrit term sāmānādhikaraṇya, which is commonly translated as ‘correlative predication’, has be­come an important ontological principle in one of the vedānta schools (viśiṣṭādvaita of Rāmānuja). Previously, this term is found in the (...) grammar of Panini and in the related philosophy of the Bhartirhari language In viśiṣṭādvaita, this term denotes (a) a logical and grammatical method of interpreting the sacred texts, according to which all texts of śruti, despite their inconsistency, should be considered by the interpreter as equally authori­tative; (b) the principle justifying and explaining the viśiṣṭādvaitic model of ontology; (c) and the resulting only possible paradigm of liberation of the soul (bhakti, or devo­tional love of God, which is based on karma and jñāna, as a way of salvation). The analy­sis of the material of Indian philosophy is carried out in the context of the developments of Western European philosophy, in particular, Porphyry and a number of analytical philosophers (Frege, Russell, Wittshenstein). Using the example of sāmānādhikaraṇya, a different logical model of the structure of the world is presented, which makes the on­tology proposed in viśiṣṭādvaita understandable and convincing. (shrink)

It is often maintained that co-referential terms can be substituted for one another whilst preserving truth-value in extensional contexts, and preserving grammaticality in all contexts. Crispin Wright calls this claim ‘The Reference Principle’ . Since Wright defines extensional contexts as those in which truth-value is determined only by reference, it is the assertion about substitution salva congruitate that is significant. Wright argues that RP is the key to understanding how Frege came to hold, paradoxically, that the concept horse is (...) not a concept, and to providing a resolution to the paradox .RP and Wright's application of it to Frege's Paradox have recently been criticized by Oliver . 1 Oliver argues that the syntax of natural languages is too complicated for the failure of two terms to fit into the same forms of speech to indicate a difference in semantic significance: RP is, he claims, an empirical falsehood.I shall argue that, although Oliver's arguments show that RP is false as it stands, a revised version of the principle, employing a more robust notion of substitution, is nevertheless correct. I shall end by outlining the implications of this revision for the appeal to RP and for Wright's resolution of Frege's Paradox.1. Referring terms and referential positionOliver's case against RP appeals to an impressive array of counter-examples. For our purposes it will be useful to regard these as being of three sorts. The first sort can be dealt with relatively swiftly: examples of the second and third sorts are more challenging.The first sort of counter-example involves referring terms that feature as parts of complex referring expressions. Oliver's examples include ‘William’ in the complex expression ‘William the Conqueror’ . The substitution of expressions co-referential with ‘William’ into sentences employing the complex referring expression often results in ungrammatical …. (shrink)

Those who believe that linguistic philosophy has no principles are not likely to have their opinion dispelled by Waismann's book. The book, written prior to World War II, withdrawn from the publisher and constantly modified thereafter, does not attempt to present a set of philosophical or metaphilosophical principles. What it does present is a method, applied both to traditional philosophical problems and to the central themes of linguistic philosophy. If the method has a principle, it is to be found (...) in the concept of a grammatical rule. Philosophical questions are clarified by appeal to rules of grammar, beyond which there can be no appeal. Principles was written as a textbook, and could be quite useful as such since all the important issues of analytic philosophy are raised. Despite the obvious influence of Wittgenstein, the treatment of the issues, the linguistic philosophy presented, is Waismann's own unique blend. The blend is interesting and often fruitful.—A. E. J. (shrink)

This paper discusses the main minimalist theory within the Minimalist Program, something I dub the (Weak) Merge Hypothesis (MH). (1) The (Weak) Merge Hypothesis (MH): Merge is a central G operation. I suggest that we extend (1) by adding to it a general principle that I dub the Fundamental Principle of Grammar (FPG). (2) The Fundamental Principle of Grammar (FPG): α and β can be grammatically related. (G-related) only if α and β have merged. Adding (1) and (...) (2) gives us the Strong Merge Hypothesis. (3) The Strong Merge Hypothesis (SMH): All grammatical dependencies are mediated by Merge. SMH has some interesting consequences which the rest of the paper briefly reviews. Highlights include the Movement Theory of Construal, The Periscope Property on selection, as well as preserving the standard results from the Weak Merge Hypothesis. (shrink)

This paper investigates the semantic bases of class membership in the noun class system of Gújjolaay Eegimaa (Eegimaa henceforth), a Niger-Congo and Atlantic language of the BAK group spoken in Southern Senegal. The question of whether semantic principles underlie the overt classification of nouns in Niger-Congo languages is a controversial one. There is a common perception of Niger-Congo noun class systems as being mainly semantically arbitrary. The goal of the present paper is to show that physical properties and culture-specific factors (...) are central principles of semantic categorisation in the Eegimaa noun class system. I argue that the Eegimaa overt grammatical classification of nouns into classes is a semantic categorisation system whereby categories are structured according to prototypicality, family resemblance, metaphorical and metonymic extensions and chaining processes, as argued within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. I show that the categorisation of entities in the Eegimaa nominal classification system productively makes use of physical properties such as shape as well as using culture-specific, less productive parameters for the semantic categorisation of entities denoted by nouns. The analysis proposed here also shows that the cases of multiple morphosyntactic classifications of nouns reflect multiple conceptual categorisation strategies. A detailed examination of the formal and semantic instances of multiple classification reveals the existence of conceptual correlations between the physical properties and the culture-specific semantic parameters of categorisation used in the Eegimaa noun class system. (shrink)

Teaching writing to doctoral students or academics at a technical university is a challenging task. Because they need to publish their research findings in English to pursue academic careers, they are usually highly motivated and expect a lot of the class. Their language competences, however, very often lack enough proficiency and may contribute to manuscript rejection. The paper focuses on language issues based on the rules of controlled natural languages and guidelines of Plain English. It shows how employing these issues (...) improves grammatical quality and readability of science-oriented written texts. The paper describes four principles: removing nominalisation and using the so-called strong verbs to make the message simpler and more direct; combining nouns in strings to express complex ideas economically; applying grammatical consistency for coordinate elements in sentences to make them less chaotic; and reducing wordiness to obtain a more precise and comprehensible piece of writing. Sample phrases and sentences from authentic student writing as well as their improved versions are provided to each of the guidelines so that a reader has a deeper insight into how the principles work in a specialist context. Because problems with, for example, research papers, grant proposals or reports are common to various disciplines and at various levels, the Author of the paper draws conclusions that these principles should be implemented not only in a technical but also legal, medical and business writing course offered by English teachers to both young researchers and experienced scientists. (shrink)

In this short review I address certain issues and predictions that arise from the position papers by Erteschik- Shir, and by Fox and Pesetsky. The two proposed analyses are radically different, so I have made no attempt to relate them in terms of their properties. In section 1 I discuss some underlying issues in the architecture of grammar assumed by Erteschik-Shir, and in section 2 I evaluate some of the predictions generated by Fox and Pesetsky’s approach. In section 3 I (...) draw some more general conclusions about what consequences Object Shift shows us concerning the organization of grammar, and the nature of grammatical principles. While my remarks mainly address problems or drawbacks that I see with the proposals in the two position papers, they both offer a stimulating account of OS and explore the wider implications of the natures of their enterprises, and deserve fuller consideration beyond the present venue, consideration that they will surely receive. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky claims that we know the grammatical principles of our languages in pretty much the same sense that we know ordinary things about the world (e.g. facts), a view about linguistic knowledge that I term ''cognitivism''. In much recent philosophy of linguistics (including that sympathetic to Chomsky's general approach to language), cognitivism has been rejected in favour of an account of grammatical competence as some or other form of mental mechanism, describable at various levels of abstraction (''non-cognitivism''). (...) I argue for cognitivism and against non-cognitivism. First, I show that the distinction between competence and performance in current linguistics is as clearly made as ever it was, in spite of recent interest in linguistic processing modules. Second, I use these facts about the practice of theoretical linguistics to refute various proposals for a non-cognitivist construal of grammatical competence, and to support cognitivism by reflecting on the inapplicability of a multi-level account of linguistic competence. Cognitivism is then defended against several objections centring around the problems of rational integration and conceptualization of grammatical knowledge. Finally, the conception of competence argued for in relation to linguistics is placed in the larger context of cognitive science research and its implications for philosophy of mind. (shrink)

By formalizing recent syntactic theories for natural languages Stabler shows how their complexity can be handled without guesswork or oversimplification. By formalizing recent syntactic theories for natural languages in the tradition of Chomsky's Barriers, Stabler shows how their complexity can be handled without guesswork or oversimplification. He introduces logical representations of these theories together with special deductive techniques for exploring their consequences that will provide linguists with a valuable tool for deriving and testing theoretical predictions and for experimenting with alternative (...) formulations of grammatical principles. Stabler's novel approach allows results to be deduced with straightforward calculations and provides a systematic framework for tackling the problem of how speakers can infer the properties of an utterance from principles of the grammar. The special treatment of equality, induction principles, and inclusion of a general method for collecting structures from proofs means that sophisticated linguistic arguments can be carried out in detail, giving a rich perspective to issues in linguistic theory and parsing. (shrink)

Nicholas Allott considers Chomsky at ninety. [This is a short introduction to Chomsky's linguistic work, its implications for our knowledge about language and the mind, and its connections with the political philosophy that is implicit in his work on international relations and the media. I argue that Chomsky's contribution to linguistics, cognitive science and philosophy should not be controversial. He has been a major influence on the computational/representational view of the mind that is now taken for granted in serious work (...) in linguistics and cognitive psychology. His work in linguistics revolutionised the field, leading to the discovery of grammatical principles with considerable explanatory power, and has shifted the burden against those who oppose Universal Grammar: an innate, domain-specific system that underlies our linguistic abilities. Chomsky's political work includes detailed critiques of US and other Western policy, particularly foreign policy, and, with Edward Herman, a model that seeks to explain how radical opinions and inconvenient facts are excluded from the media. Chomsky also has a political philosophy, although he does not set it out in detail. He sees human beings as intrinsically creative and with an instinct for freedom, and he takes these features of human nature to favour a libertarian socialist society.]. (shrink)

Our modern culture is written culture first of all. And therefore now the perception of every sphere of human activity is connected with the purport of the Literary idea, idea of the space, which includes all metamorphoses of Writing. And so science and philosophy take on specific significance as varieties of the literaturewith corresponding stylistic descriptions. Here I consider the style 1) as particular motion of the body of Writing, in which its nature reflects; 2) as living thing, realizing not (...) verbal cultural ideals; 3) as the way and the incarnating form of the conversion of consciousness; 4) as organizing «grammatical» principle, which determines the structure of certain literary «language». The investigation of the literary styles of science and philosophy permits to expose likenesses (for example, the level of the cogitative viscidity of the texts) and differences (for example, in the principles of the construction of scientific and philosophical plots) between indicated manners. (shrink)

Emergentist approaches to language are burdened with two responsibilities in contemporary cognitive science. On the one hand, they must offer a different and better understanding of the well-known phenomena that appear to support traditional formal approaches to language. On the other hand, they must extend the search for alternative explanations beyond the familiar languages of Europe and East Asia. I pursue this joint endeavor here by outlining an emergentist account for constraints on local anaphora in English and Balinese, with a (...) view to showing that, despite numerous proposals to the contrary, the two languages manifest essentially the same system of coreference and that the system in question is shaped by processing pressures rather than grammatical principles. (shrink)

The grammatical constraints on anaphoric binding, known as binding principles, are observed to form a classical square of oppositions. These constraints are then analysed as the effect of phase quantifiers over reference markers in grammatical obliqueness hierarchies, and the resulting phase quantifiers are shown to be organised in a square of logical duality. The impact of this result on the distinction between quantificational and referential nominals as well as on the logical foundations of the semantics of nominals in (...) general is discussed. (shrink)

Grammatical theories of Scalar Implicatures make use of an exhaustivity operator exh, which asserts the conjunction of the prejacent with the negation of excludable alternatives. We present a new Grammatical theory of Scalar Implicatures according to which exh is replaced with pex, an operator that contributes its prejacent as asserted content, but the negation of scalar alternatives at a non-at-issue level of meaning. We show that by treating this non-at-issue level as a presupposition, this theory resolves a number (...) of empirical challenges faced by the old formulation of exh (as well as by standard neo-Gricean theories). The empirical challenges include projection of scalar implicatures from certain embedded environments (‘some under some’ sentences, some under negative factives), their restricted distribution under negation, and the existence of common ground-mismatching and oddness-inducing implicatures. We argue that these puzzles have a uniform solution given a pex-based Grammatical theory of implicatures and some independently motivated principles concerning presupposition projection, cancellation and accommodation. (shrink)

A central goal of typological research is to characterize linguistic features in terms of both their functional role and their fit to social and cognitive systems. One long-standing puzzle concerns why certain languages employ grammatical gender. In an information theoretic analysis of German noun classification, Dye, Milin, Futrell, and Ramscar enumerated a number of important processing advantages gender confers. Yet this raises a further puzzle: If gender systems are so beneficial to processing, what does this mean for languages that (...) make do without them? Here, we compare the communicative function of gender marking in German to that of prenominal adjectives in English, finding that despite their differences, both systems act to efficiently smooth information over discourse, making nouns more equally predictable in context. We examine why evolutionary pressures may favor one system over another and discuss the implications for compositional accounts of meaning and Gricean principles of communication. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein in his later works often implies commitment to a doctrine of the autonomy or arbitrariness of grammar. This chapter discusses the conception of grammar that is presupposed in this doctrine and then explains the doctrine itself. The chapter also explains a sense in which grammar is not autonomous or arbitrary for Wittgenstein and discusses some possible criticisms of the doctrine. It should be noted at the outset that this whole area of exegetical concern is one in which the (...) fairly widespread conception in the secondary literature that the later Wittgenstein is a complete “quietist” in philosophy ‐ i.e., someone who advances no positive doctrines of his own, although encouraged by some of his own statements, seems impossible to sustain. Wittgenstein's doctrine of the autonomy or arbitrariness of grammar presupposes a highly distinctive conception of grammar, one which at least prima facie has little to do with our everyday conception of grammar. (shrink)

The logical form of a discourse—such as a proposition, a set of propositions, an argument, or an argumentation—is obtained by abstracting from the subject-matter of its content terms or by regarding the content terms as mere place-holders or blanks in a form. In a logically perfect language the logical form of a proposition, a set of propositions, an argument, or an argumentation is determined by the grammatical form of the sentence, the set of sentences, the argument-text, or the argumentation-text (...) expressing it. Two such discourse-texts are said to have the same grammatical form, in this sense, if a uniform one-one substitution of content words transforms the one exactly into the other. The sentence ‘Abe properly respects every agent who respects himself’ may be regarded as having the same grammatical form as the sentence ‘Ben generously assists every patient who assists himself’. (shrink)

The Reference Principle states that co-referring expressions are everywhere intersubstitutable salva congruitate. On first glance, looks like a truism, but a truism with some bite: transforms difficult philosophical questions about co-reference into easy grammatical questions about substitutability. This has led a number of philosophers to think that we can use to make short work of certain longstanding metaphysical debates. For example, it has been suggested that all we need to do to show that the predicate ‘ is a (...) horse’ does not refer to a property is point out that ‘ is a horse’ and ‘the property of being a horse’ are not everywhere intersubstitutable salva congruitate. However, when we understand ‘substitution’ in the simplest and most straightforward way, is no truism; in fact, natural languages are full of counterexamples to the principle. In this paper, I introduce a new notion of substitution, and then develop and argue for a version of that is immune to these counterexamples. Along the way I touch on the following topics: the relation between argument forms and their natural language instances; the reification of sense; the difference between terms and predicates; and the relation between reference and disquotation. I end by arguing that my new version of cannot be used to settle metaphysical debates quite as easily as some philosophers would like. (shrink)

In this volume, the author investigates and argues for, a particular answer to the question: What is the right way to logically analyze modalities from natural language within formal languages? The answer is: by formalizing modal expressions in terms of predicates. But, as in the case of truth, the most intuitive modal principles lead to paradox once the modal notions are conceived as predicates. -/- The book discusses the philosophical interpretation of these modal paradoxes and argues that any satisfactory approach (...) to modality will have to face the paradoxes independently of the grammatical category of the modal notion. By systematizing modal principles with respect to their joint consistency and inconsistency, Stern provides an overview of the options and limitations of the predicate approach to modality that may serve as a useful starting point for future work on predicate approaches to modality. Stern also develops a general strategy for constructing philosophically attractive theories of modal notions conceived as predicates. The idea is to characterize the modal predicate by appeal to its interaction with the truth predicate. This strategy is put to use by developing the modal theories Modal Friedman-Sheard and Modal Kripke-Feferman. (shrink)

This chapter attempts to unravel the differences, whether real or merely apparent, between Chomsky's linguistics and usage‐based linguistics (UBL). The principal alternative to generative grammar in the world today is a broad umbrella of approaches that fall under the general heading of UBL. UBL is the successor to a Piagetian approach to language acquisition, where experience and general learning principles shape the acquisition process. Functionalism takes the position that properties of grammatical systems are explicable in terms of properties of (...) systems that lie outside of grammar per se. The chapter discusses that the few direct references Chomsky has made to usage‐based linguistics. It presents the most important issues, one‐by‐one, that separate Chomsky's views from those of UBLists. They are the explananda of linguistic theory, grammar design and architecture, semantics, language acquisition and innately‐provided linguistic constructs, functional explanation, and the sources of data on which a linguistic theory might be constructed. (shrink)

The article suggests specific grammatical features of some languages of the leading philosophical traditions of Eurasia, which can explain some of the differences in philo­sophical thinking that exist in these traditions. In particular, the use of Genetivus Objec­tivus in Sanskrit, New European, Latin and Arabic languages is considered, its possible correlation with the socio-practice of cultures in which these languages are dominant is analyzed. As a theoretical preamble, which allows not only to raise, but also to compre­hend the designated (...) problems, the author refers to the logical-semantic theory proposed by the Russian philosopher and arabist Andrei V. Smirnov (b. 1958), which deals with subject-predicate constructions in substantive and procedural logic, the problems of cor­relation of language and thinking, as well as the commensurability of the bases rationality in different philosophical cultures. Analyzing the peculiarities of the use of the so-called object genitive case (Genetivus Objectivus) in different linguistic traditions, the author comes to the conclusion that it is the grammar of a language that often determines the pe­culiarities of a person’s thinking, which in turn are reflected in the socio-practice of a par­ticular culture. Using the example of the Sanskrit fragment “Śrībhāṣya” by the Indian me­dieval philosopher Rāmānuja (XI–XII), in which the compound word (brahmajijñāsā) is proposed to be read as a combination of two nouns in the construction of Genetivus Ob­jectivus (brahmano jijñāsā) (with reference to the grammar of Pāṇini), the author of the article shows the peculiarity of Sanskrit-speaking thinking in comparison with New Euro­pean, Arabic and Latin languages. This feature is understood in the light of the defini­tions offered by philosophical traditions to understand the nature of God or the Absolute Principle. (shrink)

In this important and pioneering book Frederick Newmeyer takes on the question of language variety. He considers why some language types are impossible and why some grammatical features are more common than others. The task of trying to explain typological variation among languages has been mainly undertaken by functionally-oriented linguists. Generative grammarians entering the field of typology in the 1980s put forward the idea that cross-linguistic differences could be explained by linguistic parameters within Universal Grammar, whose operation might vary (...) from language to language. Unfortunately, this way of looking at variation turned out to be much less successful than had been hoped for. Professor Newmeyer's alternative to parameters combines leading ideas from functionalist and formalist approaches which in the past have been considered incompatible. He throws fresh light on language typology and variation, and provides new insights into the principles of Universal Grammar. The book is written in a clear, readable style and will be readily understood by anyone with a couple of years' study of linguistics. It will interest a wide range of scholars and students of language, including typologists, historical linguists, and theorists of every shade. (shrink)

This book investigates context-sensitivity in natural language by examining the meaning and use of a target class of theoretically recalcitrant expressions. These expressions-including epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague language -exhibit systematic differences from paradigm context-sensitive expressions in their discourse dynamics and embedding properties. Many researchers have responded by rethinking the nature of linguistic meaning and communication. Drawing on general insights about the role of context in interpretation and collaborative action, Silk develops an improved contextualist theory of CR-expressions (...) within the classical truth-conditional paradigm: Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the distinctive linguistic behavior of a CR-expression from a particular contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. It is shown how in using CR-expressions, speakers can exploit their mutual grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to coordinate their attitudes and negotiate about how the context should evolve. The book focuses primarily on developing a Discourse Contextualist semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals. The Discourse Contextualist framework is also applied to other categories of epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague adjectives. The similarities/differences among these expressions, and among context-sensitive expressions more generally, have been underexplored. The development of Discourse Contextualism in this book sheds light on general features of meaning and communication, and the variety of ways in which context affects and is affected by uses of language. Discourse Contextualism provides a fruitful framework for theorizing about various broader issues in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. (shrink)

In 1903, in _The Principles of Mathematics_ (_PoM_), Russell endorsed an account of classes whereupon a class fundamentally is to be considered many things, and not one, and used this thesis to explicate his first version of a theory of types, adding that it formed the logical justification for the grammatical distinction between singular and plural. The view, however, was short-lived; rejected before _PoM_ even appeared in print. However, aside from mentions of a few misgivings, there is little evidence (...) about why he abandoned this view. In this paper, I speculate as to what those reasons were, and evaluate them in light of recent work and interest in plural logic. (shrink)

The Sense of I: Conceptualizing Subjectivity: In Indian Philosophy (Sāṃkhya-Yoga) This book discusses the sense of I as it is captured in the Sāṃkhya-Yoga tradition – one of the oldest currents of Indian philosophy, dating back to as early as the 7th c. BCE. The author offers her reinterpretation of the Yogasūtra and Sāṃkhyakārikā complemented with several commentaries, including the writings of Hariharānanda Ᾱraṇya – a charismatic scholar-monk believed to have re-established the Sāṃkhya-Yoga lineage in the early 20th century. The (...) textual analysis of the classical Sanskrit sources and their constructive interpretation is enhanced by some crucial questions and points of dispute commonly picked up in the contemporary philosophy of mind, such as the challenge of ontological and categorical reductionism, the criteria of personal identity, the limits of agency and free will, the ineluctability of self-deception, etc. However, defining the sense of ego (ahaṃkāra) and ‘I-am-ness’ (asmitā) is the main focus of this research. Four chapters composing the study are subsequently devoted to: (1) the methodological assumptions of the present author and the basic historical distinctions relevant to the subject matter, (2) linguistic preconditioning of I-consciousness as well as metaphysical coherency and ambiguity of the concept of subjectivity presented by Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophers, (3) cognitive and ontological issues concerning the embodied ego being opposed to inactive and contentless consciousness, or the pure self (puruṣa), (4) axiological evaluation of self-discipline and significance of liberation from ego. 1. The method, scope, and problem. In the first chapter, the method of comparative philosophy adopted in this book is introduced by a phenomenological analysis of ‘otherness’ and ‘alienness’ inspired by the considerations of Bernhard Waldenfels and his understanding of xenology. This section is followed by a critical reflection on the incommensurability of the alternative conceptual frameworks, supported by some arguments provided by Ludwik Fleck and Richard E. Nisbett. When explaining the term ‘comparative philosophy’, the author pays special attention to those proponents of the aforementioned current who contributed to the rapprochement of Western and Indian philosophical traditions by tracing both their similarities and divergences. The author makes references to numerous prominent researchers, such as Paul Masson-Oursel, Paul Deussen, Stanisław Schayer, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Bimal K. Matilal, Raimundo Panikkar, Daya Krishna, Wilhelm Halbfass, and many others representing a younger generation. The historical introduction presents a concise survey of the evolution of the Sāṃkhya-Yoga textual tradition, and distinguishes five phases of its development: proto-Sāṃkhya (7th c. BCA – 1st c. CE), pre-classical phase (1st – 5th c. CE), classical Sāṃkhya (3rd – 9th c. CE), post-classical phase (till 14th c.), and neo-classical phase (since 1927). Here, the author also evaluates the primary sources, including Sanskrit commentaries, and the secondary sources in the light of their relevance and usefulness to the constructive interpretation of Yogasūtra and Sāṃkhyakārikā. Then, she makes some methodological remarks concerning the specificity of their reading. This section is concluded with highlighting three main strategies usually applied when interpreting Patañjali’s sūtras: (1) anti-philosophical approach – treating the text as a merely mystical report or the yogic vademecum, (2) anti-mystical perspective – which reads the text as a highly speculative divagation of no much use to a practitioner, (3) mystic-and- philosophical approach – emphasizing the fact that the theory of consciousness presented in Yogasūtra is both philosophically coherent and empirically (or mystically) verified. The author argues for the third, heuristic, perspective mentioned above. The last section of the first chapter aims to problematize the I-concept (aham) and the paradoxical situation of the ego searching for self-knowledge. This part starts with the acknowledgement of the deliberation on non-self (anātman) by Śāntideva, a Buddhist philosopher claiming that one’s own ego ought to be identified with the ego of any other. Then, the author unfolds the fundamental assumptions and scope of the constructive interpretation she wants to develop following K.C. Bhattacharyya’s clues. When explaining her reasons, she stresses both the need to reveal the philosophical meaning of the source materials and, at the same time, the need to make them meaningful on the ground of our contemporary philosophical enquiry. Thus, among the main purposes there is a reliable, scrupulous and careful reconstruction of the historical conception of the self as elaborated on in the classical period of Sāṃkhya-Yoga tradition, as well as reinterpretation of the sense of I as it was grasped by the Sāṃkhya-Yoga thinkers in terms of modern comparative and ‘polylogical’ discourse. 2. Naming I. In the second chapter, a variety of linguistic categories capturing different aspects of subjectivity is discussed in detail. A textual examination is preceded by clarification of the semantic distinctions made by Patañjali, such as a verbal convention (saṃketa) which stands for uniting or overlapping a word (śabda), its meaning (artha) and a mental state of comprehension (pratyaya) that ascribes the word to a particular object. Among the key concepts there is also explained a spontaneous mental activity referring to pseudo-objects posited only by words (vikalpa), which is unwittingly involved in every process of conceptualizing, designating, and naming objects. Such mental states can neither be ‘valid’ nor ‘invalid’, and are believed to unavoidably accompany one’s use of language. These presuppositions testify to Patañjali’s severe criticism towards all verbal conventions that not only affect the way we formulate and construct our views, but also determine the very process of perception. A major section of the chapter contains the analysis of the ambiguous sense of subjectivity and its basic aspects distinguished by the author in the result of a contextual and comparative study of the Sanskrit terms used in Yogasūtra and Sāṃkhyakārikā for naming I-consciousness. The six basic aspects of the self comprise: essentializing oneself, perceiving (something), getting conscious (of something), mastering or owning (something), and being capable of self-identifying as well as disidentifying oneself. A majority of the enumerated predicates ascribed to the self refer to different functions and activities of the empirical ego and the embodied mind. Yet, apart from this intentional, active, reactive, sensing, and objectifiable self Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophers distinguish a sense of subjectivity going beyond all these psycho-physical characteristics: the self that remains unmanifest, non-active, free from experiencing any joy or pain, said to be the principle of consciousness. The plausibility of its existence as the final cause of the world is to be determined by the embodied ego by virtue of abductive reasoning based on the analysis of all material and psycho-physical phenomena preconditioned by three guṇas that compose the domain of nature (prakṛti). In the subsequent section, three Sanskrit notions – ahaṃkāra, asmitā, and puruṣa, most significant for the Sāṃkhya and Yoga understanding of subjectivity, are discussed closely one after another to expose their semantic, epistemic and metaphysical connotations. The chapter is completed by some pivotal remarks bringing out the problem of discrepancy between the metaphysical position implied by Patañjali and Īśvarakṛṣṇa, and the grammatical instruments applied by them to express it. 3. Cognizing I. The third chapter addresses two important issues in the phenomenology of self-perception, namely the question of psycho-physical dualism explained on the grounds of the considered darśanas, and the spiritual quest for the ideal embodiment of consciousness. While emphasizing the unity of human psycho-physical nature the author refers to several contemporary Western thinkers, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Nagel, John R. Searle, David Chalmers and others, by making some comparative remarks on the idea of the embodied mind. Furthermore, three arguments for the plurality of selves (puruṣa-bahutva) are reconstructed and critically considered. The arguments given by Īśvarakṛṣṇa (SK 18) include the diversity of ways in which one experiences one’s life and death, the spatio-temporal distinctness of particular embodied egos, and the variations of features manifested by individual selves. The second section of this chapter presents a thorough inquiry into a non-theistic devotion and spiritual pragmatism defended by the adherents of Sāṃkhya- Yoga. God (īśvara) is defined here primarily as an object of meditative practice and a special tool convenient for yogic pedagogy. In the concluding part of this section four functions of devotional practice (īśvara-pranidhāna) are recognized and explained; they embrace: (1) prevention from mental scattering and dispersion, (2) therapy allowing to form some positive perceptual habits and the right cognitive approach, (3) enhancement of morally and spiritually required qualities, and (4) reinforcement of the sense of subjective identity being a complementary method of self-development. 4. Liberating oneself from I. The final chapter consists of three sections. The first one introduces the concept of liberation through action (pravṛtti-dharma), commonly opposed in Indian tradition to the path of renunciation (nivṛtti- dharma). According to Hariharānanda Ᾱraṇya’s interpretation, both Sāṃkhya- Yoga and Buddhism follow the latter one, which in terms of spiritual practice dynamics makes them much closer to each other than it is usually believed. In the subsequent section the idea of liberating oneself from one’s attachment to ego is explained in detail, along with the significance of gradual self-negation. Then the author raises the interpretation of the Sāṃkhya-Yoga perspective on liberation as self-distinction-through-renunciation. The main focus in this section is placed on the sense of agency (kartṛ), the problem of free will, and the criteria of moral and soteriological evaluation of one’s deeds. Some crucial questions on karmic conditioning of self-knowledge in the form of kleśas are also the subject of careful analysis. The next section undertakes the issue of ownership (mamakāra) of one’s activity and self-esteem (abhimāna) involved in spiritual growth. Again, some comparative remarks are made by referring to the Buddhist philosophers’ positions, such as Nāgārjuna, Āryadeva and Candrakīrti. Among others, the Buddhist refutation of the Sāṃkhya-Yoga concept of eternal, inactive, indifferent, irresponsible, and exclusively conscious self (puruṣa) is quoted and partly rejected in favour of the classical Hindu darśanas. In summary, the author emphasized the significance-generating or sense-creating function of I, its engagement in the search for its own raison d’être, its role in self-identification as well as subverting it, and the expediency of liberation from ego. The philosophers of classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga indicate a twofold sense of the self; on the one hand, the only appropriate designation: ‘I’ is true self (puruṣa), a passive and unknowable principle of consciousness whose existence makes the empirical phenomena meaningful. On the other hand, the ‘I’ clearly designates the current sense of the self, expressed as “I think”, “I doubt”, “I suffer”, etc. This second meaning of ‘I’, the specific sense of ‘mineness’, is recognized as a secondary and relative one – thus illusive and troublesome. However, its delusiveness does not mean that the empirical ego is an unreal or non-existent entity. What it implies is that the empirical self-identity is fundamentally inadequate and – according to the Indian thinkers – ought to be unveiled and, ultimately, given up. (shrink)

This essay argues that there is room for a third position between moral particularism and moral generalism in their orthodox forms. The view proposed in this essay is inspired by the later Wittgenstein's conception of grammar and holds that formulations of ethical principles can be interpreted as grammatical statements, while ethical problems can be interpreted as instances of grammatical tension. On this reading, situations in which ethical principles turn out to conflict come out as moments in the evolution (...) of language. Three consequences are discussed, and welcomed as general insights into the workings of language. (shrink)

This paper examines the Stanford typed dependencies representation, which was designed to provide a straightforward description of grammatical relations for any user who could benefit from automatic text understanding. For such purposes, we argue that dependency schemes must follow a simple design and provide semantically contentful information, as well as offer an automatic procedure to extract the relations. We consider the underlying design principles of the Stanford scheme from this perspective, and compare it to the GR and PARC representations. (...) Finally, we address the question of the suitability of the Stanford scheme for parser evaluation. (shrink)

persusasions are in addition impressed by its remarkable conciseness, and by the rigorous consistency with which it deploys its semi-formalized metalanguage, a grammatically and lexically regimented form of Sanskrit. Empiricists like Bloomfield also admired it for another, more specific reason, namely that it is based on nothing but very general principles such as simplicity, without prior commitments to any scheme of “universal grammar”, or so it seems, and proceeds from a strictly synchronic perspective. Generative linguists for their part have marveled (...) especially at its ingenious technical devices, and at intricate system of conventions governing rule application and rule interaction that it presupposes, which seem to uncannily anticipate ideas of modern linguistic theory (if only because many of them were originally borrowed from P¯. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I investigate a conception of thoughts figuring in ordinary discourse, and argue that this conception is an improvement over a certain standard conception employed in current philosophical and linguistic endeavors. ;In Chapter 2, I discuss the leading principles of the standard conception, a conception according to which thoughts in general are to be identified with propositions. I also briefly preview some of the main features that distinguish the conception developed in the course of this study from the (...) standard conception. ;Chapter 4 is the heart of the thesis. I isolate a reading of the verb 'think' that I contend is both familiar from and central to our ordinary discourse about thoughts and thinking--the "generic reading", I call it. An investigation of the relation expressed by the verb, 'think', on this generic reading, and of the correlative conception of thoughts, occupies the remainder of the study. ;If this ordinary conception of thoughts is to serve the principal functions to which thoughts have standardly been assigned, in philosophical and linguistic endeavors, then there should be a discernible sense in which it is correct to say that thoughts, so conceived, are things that sentences express. In Chapter 5, I discuss the relevant notion of sentential expression. Accounts of this notion have commonly faced a stumbling block in the case of non-declarative sentences. What sort of thoughts, for example, can imperatives or interrogatives be said to express? In Chapter 6, I explain how, on the present conception, there is a clear sense in which sentences of a variety of grammatical moods--imperatives and interrogatives as well as declaratives--may be said, with equal propriety, to express thoughts. ;In Chapter 7, I discuss a fundamental thesis of the standard conception, and argue, in Chapter 8, that any account of the nature of thoughts accommodating this thesis is incompatible with the conception of thoughts arrived at in Chapter 4. Then, in order to retain this familiar conception and its benefits, a new account of the nature of thoughts must be provided. Such an account is described in Chapter 9. (shrink)

Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Piraha˜ is exceptional in displaying ‘inexplicable gaps’, that these gaps follow from a cultural principle restricting communication to ‘immediate experience’, and that this principle has ‘severe’ consequences for work on universal grammar. We argue against each of these claims. Relying on the available documentation and descriptions of the language, especially the rich material in Everett 1986, 1987b, we argue that many of the exceptional grammatical ‘gaps’ supposedly characteristic of Piraha˜ (...) are misanalyzed by Everett (2005) and are neither gaps nor exceptional among the world’s languages. We find no evidence, for example, that Piraha˜ lacks embedded clauses, and in fact find strong syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of their existence in Piraha˜. Likewise, we find no evidence that Piraha˜ lacks quantifiers, as claimed by Everett (2005). Furthermore, most of the actual properties of the Piraha˜ constructions discussed by Everett (for example, the ban on prenominal possessor recursion and the behavior of WH-constructions) are familiar from languages whose speakers lack the cultural restrictions attributed to the Piraha˜. Finally, following mostly Gonc¸alves (1993, 2000, 2001), we also question some of the empirical claims about Piraha˜ culture advanced by Everett in primary support of the ‘immediate experience’ restriction. We conclude that there is no evidence from Piraha˜ for the particular causal relation between culture and grammatical structure suggested by Everett. (shrink)

A disjunctive sentence like Olivia took Logic or Algebra conveys that Olivia didn’t take both classes and that the speaker doesn’t know which of the two classes she took. The corresponding sentence with a possibility modal, Olivia can take Logic or Algebra, conveys instead that she can take Logic and that she can take Algebra. These exclusivity, ignorance and free choice inferences are argued by many to be scalar implicatures. Recent work has looked at cases in which exclusivity and ignorance (...) appear to be computed instead at the presupposition level, independently from the assertion. On the basis of those data, Spector and Sudo :473–517, 2017) have argued for a hybrid account relying on a pragmatic principle for deriving implicatures in the presupposition. In this paper, we observe that a sentence like Noah is unaware that Olivia can take Logic or Algebra has a reading on which free choice appears in the presupposition, but not in the assertion, and we show that deriving this reading is challenging on Spector and Sudo’s hybrid account. Following the dialectic in Fox, we argue against a pragmatic approach to presupposition-based implicatures on the ground that it is not able to account for presupposed free choice. In addition, we raise a novel challenge for Spector and Sudo’s account coming from the conflicting presupposed ignorance triggered by sentences like #Noah is unaware that I have a son or a daughter, which is infelicitous even if it’s not common knowledge whether the speaker has a son or a daughter. More generally, our data reveals a systematic parallelism between the assertion and presupposition levels in terms of exclusivity, ignorance, and free choice. We argue that such parallels call for a unified analysis and we sketch how a grammatical theory of implicatures where meaning strengthening operates in a similar way at both levels :31–57, 2012; Magri in A theory of individual-level predicates based on blind mandatory scalar implicatures, MIT dissertation, 2009; Marty in Implicatures in the DP domain, MIT dissertation, 2017) can account for such parallels. (shrink)

Wittgenstein on philosophical problems : from one fundamental problem to particular problems -- The Tractatus on philosophical problems -- Wittgenstein's later conception of philosophical problems -- Examples of philosophical problems as based on misunderstandings -- Tendencies and inclinations of thinking : philosophy as therapy -- Wittgenstein's notion of peace in philosophy : the contrast with the Tractatus -- Two conceptions of clarification -- The Tractatus's conception of philosophy as logical analysis -- Wittgenstein's later critique of the Tractatus's notion of logical (...) analysis -- Clarification in Wittgenstein's later philosophy -- From metaphysics and philosophical theses to grammar : Wittgenstein's turn -- Philosophical theses, metaphysical philosophy, and the Tractatus -- Metaphysics and conceptual investigation : the problem with metaphysics -- Conceptual investigation and the problem of dogmatism -- Wittgenstein's turn -- The turn and the role of rules -- Rules as objects of comparison -- Rules, metaphysical projection, and the logic of language -- Grammar, meaning, and language -- Grammar, use, and meaning : the problem of the status of Wittgenstein's remarks -- Wittgenstein's formulation of his conception of meaning -- The concept of language : comparisons with instruments and games -- Wittgenstein's development and the advantages of his mature view -- Examples as centers of variation and the conception of language as a family -- Avoiding dogmatism about meaning -- Wittgenstein's methodological shift and analyses in terms of necessary conditions -- The concepts of essence and necessity -- Constructivist readings and the arbitrariness/nonarbitrariness of grammar -- Problems with constructivism -- The methodological dimension of Wittgenstein's conception of essence -- The nontemporality of grammatical statements -- Explanations of necessity in terms of factual regularities -- Wittgenstein's account of essence and necessity -- Beyond theses about the source of necessity -- Philosophical hierarchies and the status of clarificatory statements -- Philosophical hierarchies and Wittgenstein's "leading principle" -- The concept of perspicuous presentation -- The (alleged) necessity of accepting philosophical statements -- The concept of agreement and the problem of injustice -- The criteria of the correctness of grammatical remarks -- Multidimensional descriptions and the new use of old dogmatic claims -- Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, everyday language, and ethics -- Metaphysics disguised as methodology -- The historicity of philosophy -- Philosophy and the everyday. (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 136-140. In early 2011, Cow Heavy Books published The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature , a compendium of catalog 'blurbs' for non-existent desired or ideal texts. Along with Erinrose Mager, I edited the project, in a process that was more like curation as it mainly entailed asking a range of contemporary writers, theorists, and text-makers to send us an entry. What resulted was a creative/critical hybrid anthology, a small book in which each page opens (...) to a new iteration of textual desire. These texts explore the material possibilities of the book. Somewhat parallel to the call of N. Katherine Hayles who, in her book Writing Machines , urges literary theorists to take up the practice of Medium Specific Analysis (to account for the way the medium in which it is presented conditions or at least bears on a literary text). I see in the imagined works of The Official Catalog a call for the innovative writers of today to become Medium-Responsive. This would mean thinking through the specific (materially constrained) possibilities offered by the media in which texts are presented, and in thinking of the literary text as a kind of art in the greater context of other arts and the book as a medium situated within the context of many other media. In doing so, the contemporary writer refutes the chorus of critics who lament the death of the book by consistently reinvigorating literary innovation. The following are selections from The Official Catalog of the Library of Potential Literature that show possible paths for (thinking about) new writing that engages with its medium. —Ben Segal, Editor THE CUBE Even the most radical non-linear texts have tended to exploit or subvert only the sequential possibilities of print—from the continuous loop of Joyce's Finnegans Wake to the shuffled cards of Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 —but The Cube takes such multiplicities to an entirely new level. Set in a grid, the book's words can be read conventionally, across the page, as well as down each column—with either route making complete grammatical sense. But they can also be read as stacked strata and mined like lexical core samples through the layered pages of the book. Each path tells the same story from a different perspective (the narrative, naturally, hinges on the potential outcomes of a throw of cubed dice). By opening up the z-axis to reading in this way, The Cube recognizes the book as a three-dimensional sculptural space. Taking its lead from Armand Schwerner's (If Personal) and Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes , The Cube reads like a experiment by Christian Bök precision printed by Emily McVarish. Craig Dworkin is the editor, most recently, of The Consequence of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics (Roof Books, 2008), The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound , with Marjorie Perloff (U. Chicago Press, 2009), and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing , with Kenneth Goldsmith (Northwestern UP, 2010). He teaches at the University of Utah. HE GOES In He Goes , we read notes, letters and e-mails from a scholar father to his novelist daughter. We read of the father's musings on Beckett, on Pinter, on Anne Frank; his description of a woman hanging laundry from a line. We read about his journey toward dying, followed by a brief, third person account of his death, and his obituary. Then a long series of blank pages that demand to be read in real time, non-sentence by non-sentence, blank page by blank page. Finally—and it is here that this peculiar little book begins to soar—the dead father writes to his as-of-yet-still-living daughter. He does not write from death. He does not write from life. The words unprint, unstamp, unkindle. Still, they require no translation. The father "writes" (for lack of a better word) about the serendipitous, the commonplace; he recommends another book. He jokes. He asks his daughter how her stomach is. He says forget about presence in absence, darling; screw words as memorial and the guys in garbage cans and loss as redemption and I can't go on I must go on. He goes, "Love, Fodder." He goes, "incidentally." He goes, "I thought you might like to know." Elizabeth Graver is the author of a story collection, Have You Seen Me? , and three novels: Unravelling ; The Honey Thief ; and Awake . Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , and Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards . She teaches at Boston College. THE PAPER ARCHIVIST A stunning package and a triumph of imagination, The Paper Archivist at times looks to be less a book than an abstract expressionist painting. Softly bound, its contents unfold to a single sheet of uneven thickness and texture—a canvas splattered with colored lines, stickers, broken sentences, and nonsense pictographs. But by following the directions to fold, dip, smell, rub, scratch, and tear the sheet according to the contingencies of the weather and using only the objects at hand, the reader slowly brings the forces hidden in the noise into a glorious sculptural convergence, processing a different story and shape each time. This is the rare book that continues to stir, whirl, and pop on every new reading. Sean Higgins blogs at BOMBlog where he is responsible for the column Volumes and Territories, as well as Ghost Island , a fledgling collaborative intellectual collective. THE SLOW BOOK The Slow Book , written by an anonymous author at the dawn of literacy, on a minor planet (otherwise notable only as the source of that exceptionally hardy, not very tasty grain called “shef” sowed on hostile planets as an early step to colonization), and encoded into a series of punctures on a strip of copper coiled inside a clever device, something between a player piano and an old-fashioned film projector, is being released into print, as was the author’s intention, at a rate of one word per century (local time). Each word is, across the Forty Galaxies, agreed to be uncannily apt for the century in which it appears—even “of,” in a century during which the highest value was attached to fidelity, whether to ideals, worlds, or romantic love; even “the,” which governed two centuries, one extraordinarily materialistic, during which advances in propulsion and navigation accelerated the exchange of exceptional objects between the remotest planets of the Forty, and one in which the central concern, both of philosophers and the common man, was whether, in an age of rapidly proliferating hypothetical worlds, anyone or anything concretely existed at all. Even those words published long before interstellar contact can be seen in retrospect to have transgalactic pertinence. As a result, attempts to abstract the machine from its publishers, Hobson & Hui, in order to “predict the future” for insight or gain by “fast- forwarding” the copper strip have been many and ingenious. While, in centuries of skepticism (“maybe”), or of unrest (“go”) the book has been nearly forgotten, in others it seems to haunt every thought, every deed, despite the fact that the subject of The Slow Book is still unclear. So far only a few sentences exist in print; everyone knows them, can quote them, offer the standard exegeses and assorted heresies; yet certainties are the stuff of adolescence; mature readers are forced to acknowledge that these sentences are probably only a preamble to the main argument. They contain no proper nouns, nor can we identify any definite theme. There is even disagreement about their tone, whether coolly ironic, as some insist, or ardent. The appearance of an unusual grammatical case, sometimes called the future pluperfect continuous, used to describe events that at some future point will have always been true (but are not yet)—hitherto known to appear only in the synthetic dogmas of the Thanatographical Society, and in certain highly circumscribed religious contexts—has suggested to some scholars that the Slow Book was originally intended for ritual use, but the proximity of the usage to a term designating a small hand plow that, as Pott and Mielcke have convincingly shown, would have borne a distinctly obscene double meaning in its culture of origin in the author’s time, argues otherwise. It is likewise unclear whether the situation that seems to be—with teasing incompleteness—sketched out in these few lines is intended as an illustration of general principles, a case study, a dramatic scene, or an extended metaphor. In short, we have no idea what The Slow Book is about. In our own time, we believe that it is almost certainly a work of fiction, but that may be because we live in the century of “if”. In each age, perhaps, we see the book we most need to read. Some have dared to suggest that the metal strip is blank until, with millennial fanfare, it advances into its new position, that no ur-text exists, that the book itself is brought into being—written—by our need. But that is exactly the sort of thing we would believe, in 7645. Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy , the novel Half Life , and hypertexts including Patchwork Girl . The recipient of a Howard Foundation grant, a Pushcart Prize, and the 2006 James Tiptree Jr Award, she has also written and illustrated several children's books, including The Old Woman and the Wave ; Sophia, the Alchemist's Dog ; and Mimi's Dada Catifesto . Her stories and essays have appeared in Conjunctions , McSweeney's , The Paris Review , and Cabinet Magazine . In 2004 she launched her project SKIN , a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers. THE BOOK OF SOUNDS The Book of Sounds is just that: a book of sounds made when letters are construed in new ways to bring forth out of the alphabet new forms of speech. A book meant to be read out loud, The Book of Sounds is not unlike Laurie Anderson's O Superman or Brian Eno's Music for Airports in its attempt to make music out of the most primary and simplest of methods. It breaks language down to its barest bones and makes out of the page a drum that has never before been beaten upon. Peter Markus is the author of a novel, Bob, or Man on Boat (Dzanc Books) as well as two books of short fiction, Good, Brother and The Singing Fish , both of which were published by Calamari Press. A new collection of stories, We Make Mud , is now available from Dzanc Books. PARADISE OF THE BLIND by Celan Solen Although the reclusive Celan Solen published his first and only book in 1963—paying out-of-pocket for a limited edition of the slim collection No One May Have the Same Knowledge Again —he remained in American obscurity for almost three decades. In 1992 a micro-press in Istanbul brought out No One in Turkish. A German translation followed in 1995. Soon it became clear in literary circles Solen was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist—lyrical, dense, enigmatic—who could undo the conventional short story in 397 words by inventing impossible worlds housed in impossible whirls (in “Small Sadnesses,” a single chartreuse tree frog in Borneo unknowingly holds time together by its very presence in the universe, while each letter of its tale refers, not to itself, but to the one preceding it in the alphabet). By his disappearance last year, Solen was considered master by a generation of writers and critics (except, alas, for those gentlemen in the Swedish Academy). Imagine, then, that generation’s delight at the discovery, locked away in the author’s safe-deposit box, of his second and final composition. Had Lynch’s Lost Highway been book instead of film, and had it been penned by Beckett at his least certain, revised by Barthelme at his most formally deranged, and typeset by Derrida at his most semiotically catastrophic, the result might have been something like Paradise of the Blind : interlacing narratives of a man composed of borrowed organs (whose most cheerless and difficult to locate, god, could only have been invented by an empty heart), a nonexistent medieval painting blamed for the ruin of future hope, and the spread of a philosophy that holds earth a mistake constantly recurring in the dream of a fish lying on the floor of the Atlantic (if the fish wakes, our world winks off)—all contained in a text packed with typed-over passages, torn postcards, poems that can be deciphered only when held up to a mirror, pages ornamented with trompe-l'œil paperclips and coffee stains and buzzing houseflies, some busy with illegible runes that dissolve when exposed to light, three that smell like roses or lemons (depending on whether a man or woman is reading), two that stain with the bloody fingerprints of the those who handle them, one that ignites when brushed with breath, thirteen sewn from baby skin, one that moans when touched, and one that screams—yet all without mass, unimaginable, and invisible. Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novels Calendar of Regrets (2010) and Head in Flames (2009). He teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. SUPERSTRUCTURE! by Barbara D'Albi As soon as I opened the third drawer of Barbara D'Albi's wooden novel, everything became hopeless. Now in Ithaca, there was no going back. And it wasn't just the intricate series of shelves, hinged doors and locked drawers which D'Albi layered into the book, no, lo, I was constructed anew by the story. Who else but D'Albi to imagine a God who becomes a carpenter and gets killed?! And makes it good! You want stories? D'Albi is a skyscraper, built with planes and levers. Momentarily I wondered where I could shelve this book, and then I thought: no matter; I couldn't put it down. Adam Robinson lives in Baltimore, where he runs Publishing Genius. He is the author of Adam Robison and Other Poems and Say, Poem. 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This research tried to make a contribution to the discussion around the conditions, under which the ontological shift of the philosophical hermeneutics can be done. It began with an analysis of Gadamer's well-known formula: " Being that can be understood is language. (Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache.)". Scholars interpret it differently. By means of the grammatical analysis, I showed on the one hand an interpretation of the formula from the perspective of pan‐lingualism as absurd, because they regard (...) Being and language as identical. On the other hand, an interpretation from the perspective of the linguistic ontology should be eliminated, according to which the being possesses a linguistic character, so that its unconcealment can complete itself without the effort ofunderstanding. The two interpretations come from a misunderstanding that they regard the subordinate clause of that formula as descriptive relative clause. There is still another interpretive problem, if we regard the subordinate clause as restrictive relative clause and thus interpret Gadamer's theory as linguistic idealism. However Gadamer indicates that such an interpretation remains on the level of German idealism, because it limits understanding to an intellectual grasping. Another reading of the subordinate clause as restrictive relative clause is appropriate, because it takes understanding as a practical ability (Können) into its consideration and at the same time emphasizes the non-identity between Being and language despite their ontological inseparableness. Gadamer finds out a linguistic theory, in order to support such kind of reading. He extends his principle of aesthetic non-differentiation to the range of language. By means of thislinguistic non-differentiation, the ontological shift of the hermeneutics can complete itself. (shrink)

Cosmopolitan critics attack the scope-limitation of justice of egalitarian liberal theorists to states. They treat justice as the production of a given set of outcomes for people regardless of location or relationship. However, in doing so they either ignore the relevant agent towards whom principles of justice are addressed or see the question of agency as a practical, derivative question, of a secondary character. This paper argues that a principle of justice without a clearly justified agent is not a (...) genuine principle at all. This is what writers like Rawls mean by the "subject" of justice (analogous to the grammatical subject of a sentence, i.e.,the agent). We should reflect on agents and why they would or would not justifiably carry certain burdens for others and what kind of benefits or goods they are able to secure. The answers to those questions explain why the idea of cosmopolitan global justice is incomplete, either requiring a global basic structural agency or not applying because no relevant agent is present that can create cooperative arrangements between individual persons across the globe. Other moral principles will still apply globally, but they will be distinct from those that apply to basic-structural agencies. This account is not a practice dependence account, as it bases the distinctness of moral and political principles on purely moral and value-based considerations. (shrink)