Abstract
One common objection to Donald Davidson’s view of indirect discourse sentences is that the logical grammar that he argues for is inadequate to handle a large number of semantic and grammatical phenomena that otherwise naturally occur in such contexts, most famously the binding of pronouns by quantificational antecedents. This paper modifies some aspects of Davidson’s view in such a way as to permit such phenomena to occur while preserving the underlying idea of ‘parataxis.’ I focus on the case of binding. I sketch some extensions of the proposed modification and discuss some of the more far reaching consequences of modified theory.
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Notes
- 1.
This is not to say that, without addressing the complaint at issue here, Davidson would not be able to account for quantification and pronominal binding at all. There are many contexts in which intensionality is not at issue.
- 2.
- 3.
See Ludwig and Ray (1998) for a listing of some of the other objections to the theory. I shall have (virtually) nothing to say about those objections here.
- 4.
More fully, axioms for proper names might be: Ref[x, [NP John], σ] (‘x is the referent of [NP John] relative to a sequence of objects σ iff x = John’). Talk of sequences is important when considering quantification and I shall discuss that further below.
- 5.
Or ‘semantic value’ in the terminology of Larson and Segal (1995).
- 6.
Or perhaps Determiner Phrases (DPs), which embed Noun Phrases in many contexts. I shall stick to the more familiar idea that it is NPs that have referents here and below; see Longobardi (2001), for discussion.
- 7.
I am ignoring here those theorists who have doubted whether a semantic theory should give much credence to the intuition that substitution really fails here.
- 8.
Although not all such predicates show the same properties, e.g., ‘It is true that P.’ Not all uses of the ‘that clauses’ induce opacity.
- 9.
Davidson (1968), 106.
- 10.
Or, more precisely, root clauses.
- 11.
I am assuming that the complementizer is ‘that.’ There are other views. One might suppose, following Pesetsky and Torrego (2001), that complementizers are always unpronounced and that the ‘that’ following verbs like ‘say’ is a kind of tense element.
- 12.
Reference to utterances can be problematic for a variety of reasons. As mentioned in the introduction and further below, I am focused on one objection and am putting to one side a good many other objections.
- 13.
A point stressed by Tyler Burge (1986).
- 14.
For discussion of a version of sententialism that preserves reference to linguistic form but abandons ‘parataxis,’ see Higginbotham (2006).
- 15.
See Botterell and Stainton, op cit.
- 16.
Davidson (1968), p. 108.
- 17.
The speaker has to say something to provide a value for the demonstrative. The importance of the notion of samesaying is something I have left for another occasion but it is important here to recall that the complex notion of ‘making myself a samesayer’ sums up a way of responding to an objection to previous theories of propositional attitude sentences that occupies fully half of Davidson’s essay.
- 18.
And so the designation ‘content clause’ and ‘reporting clause’ are merely heuristic: they are not part of the theory itself.
- 19.
I say ‘apparently’ because the missing reading seems much more readily available, intuitively at any rate, if one adopts Davidson’s more prolix analysis. That would yield:
i. [∀x: boy (x)][∃y] [x said y and my next utterance makes us samesayers.] He is happy That is: for every boy, there is something he said and my next utterance makes us, he and I, samesayers: He is happy. As long as each boy said something which samesays the demonstrated utterance of mine, then the reading in question is available. i. is then ‘definitionally abbreviated’ back to 15 above. If 15 is understood in this latter way, then we can set aside the claim the ‘that’ that appears in 15 just is the demonstrative and take it to be a defined term of the theory.
- 20.
More precisely, a pronoun can be bound by a quantificational antecedent if that pronoun is c-commanded by that quantificational antecedent, where c-command is a relation that is defined over a single syntactic structure and the categories which contain the pronoun as well as the antecedent. There are well known exceptions to this principle and I am ignoring virtually all the intricacies of binding phenomena. For recent work, see Safir and Büring.
A few further points are worth mentioning. First, I am assuming here that the pronoun in the demonstrated clause in a case like
i.‘Jan thought THAT. he was late’
does not present the same problems that a pronoun bound by a quantificational antecedent would. Intuitively, the pronoun can have the same semantic value as the subject NP in the first clause. The extent to which coreference relations are syntactically encoded is an open question; see again Safir and Büring.
Secondly, quantifiers can sometimes at least appear to bind pronouns intersententially, as an anonymous reviewer stresses. Indeed, it may well be the case that binding is freely available across sentential borders and even without grammatical subordination and that it is the cases where binding is not available that is the concern of grammar and of how grammar interacts with binding. The theory that I am developing here can be used to say something about those negative conditions, as conditioned by the grammar of a language. I discuss this further below.
Lastly, I take it that Higginbotham’s intuitions about his example are correct. Combining syntactic parataxis with demonstrative reference blocks the availability of bound readings.
- 21.
For example, any relation of scope between two quantifiers in different clause seems to be problematic, not to mention the use of WH-phrases that have been extracted from deeply embedded clauses, negative polarity licensing and so on. I discuss this briefly below. Thus, even if one doubted that quantificational binding really were a matter for a theory of sentential grammar to say much about, relations of syntactic subordination surely are something which a theory of the interaction of grammar and semantic structure must address.
- 22.
If one adopts the paratactic across the board, the types of linguistic expressions that are given theorems within a semantic theory are roughly parallel to the ‘kernel sentences’ in Chomsky’s 1955/1975. In the later case, kernel sentences are joined into larger units via ‘Generalized Transformations.’ What we need now is a way of joining the kernal logical forms together in a way that allows for binding.
- 23.
This consequence, all by itself, has been enough for some to reject the theory, cf. Rècanati (2000). Below I shall argue that there are ways of understanding separating clauses that is not as theoretically naïve as some have thought.
- 24.
Segal and Speas, 1986 detail the many problems, some obvious, some more subtle.
- 25.
OST, p. 108.
- 26.
OST, p. 105.
- 27.
OST, p. 107.
- 28.
OST, p. 105.
- 29.
This helps with understanding the variety of different kinds of clauses since clauses seem to vary in the kinds of tenses that they have in addition to their mood and argument structure.
- 30.
Luigi Rizzi, (1997).
- 31.
In fact, on the view I develop below, variables in both clauses are supplied with values: the argument of ‘say’ in the reporting clause and, by default, the specification for tense in the content clause.
- 32.
See Pietroski (2004) for further discussion.
- 33.
Though they might be in some cases: see McCloskey (2002).
- 34.
See Kayne (2002) for a different view.
- 35.
See Larson and Segal (1995); Heim and Kratzer (1998).
- 36.
I am using the notion of syntactic predecessor in a way that matches, as close as possible, the linear order in which items appear. It is more common to treat what I am calling the successor clause above as the derivational predecessor, but it is also common to note that the difference between the top down and bottom up strategies within syntax are interchangeable. The top down order seems more useful for semantics.
- 37.
As we move further away from indirect speech and reports, the distributional differences between complementizers and demonstratives become more and more obvious, e.g., ‘I am happy that you came’ vs. ‘∗I am happy that. You came.’ There are loose paraphrases for what is needed here. For example: I am happy about this: you came. Other paraphrases are possible for the other cases, although there is probably no single way of rephrasing all the cases with parallel nominal demonstratives.
- 38.
For all that Davidson says, demonstratives may be semantically structured or not: no particular view about demonstrative reference is needed.
- 39.
The cases are numerous; I discuss some of them in my 2004. Note that even though Davidson is wrong that the complementizer ‘that’ associated with finite indicative clauses is the same as the nominal demonstrative expression ‘that,’ the great diversity of complementizers in the languages of the world and what they co-vary with – usually, the tense of the clause and the open oppositions within it – tells in favor of the conception of parataxis being urged here.
- 40.
Stowell (1982).
- 41.
See Higginbotham (2002).
- 42.
Perhaps then the only specific information that ‘THAT C ’ encodes pertains to whether or not the clause that follows is interpreted as finite or non-finite.
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Acknowledgments
A preliminary version of this material was presented at Carleton University in the fall of 2003. I would like to thank my audience there. The comments and questions from Michael Glanzberg, Robert May, and Kent Bach were of assistance to me as I prepared this version. Drafts of the paper were written while I was a PREA postdoctoral fellow at the University of Western Ontario, support for which I am grateful. Chris Viger’s eyes and ears were also helpful, as were Rob Stainton’s, again and again. Discussions with Ernie Lepore, Paul Pietroski, Howard Lasnik, and Samuel C. Wheeler III were also particularly helpful.
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Blair, D. (2009). Bridging the Paratactic Gap. In: Stainton, R.J., Viger, C. (eds) Compositionality, Context and Semantic Values. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 85. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-8310-5_2
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