Abstract
The subject of the present work is a subdomain of the semantics of natural languages. In the first Chapter I have attempted a preliminary survey of the phenomena observed in this field. In doing so, I limited myself entirely to a consideration of the truth values that certain sentences assume in certain situations, without explicitly going into the status of these considerations for the meaning analysis of natural language expressions. I would like to make that up in this Chapter. To be more precise: I will not discuss at length the question of whether the truth behavior of sentences has a relevant status in the semantics of natural languages. To that I can only say that truth-conditional semantics allows a systematic approach to the meaning of linguistic expressions; that it has led to by far the most successful and productive meaning analyses within theoretical linguistics so far; and that it opens up an important aspect of meaning that is inaccessible to any other approach. Having established that, we may now pay somewhat closer attention to the relationship between meanings of natural language expressions and truth values.
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References
For a brief, informative survey of question semantics, see Bäuerle (1979) [MP: Groenendijk/Stokhof (1984) present the most influential question theory of the last years, together with an instructive overview of the state of the art.]
This is the case for version (1)(ii). Since the wording of (1)(i) is less specific, it does not need to be changed. We need only reinterpret “truth conditions” as something like what is expressed in (2).
There is a wealth of literature on the problem of attitude verbs in relation to mathematical theorems. [MP: A more recent survey is provided by Bäuerle/Cresswell (1989)]
Cresswell did not have this application in mind and deliberately did not attempt an apodictic statement like (B). Nevertheless (B), taken as a methodological principle, is in the spirit of the arguments in Cresswell (1982); hence the name is justified.
The terminology in the literature is not uniform: Cresswell (1973) and Stalnaker (1978) also use the term “proposition” for the sense of a sentence, as well as “open proposition” and “propositional concept”, respectively, for sentence meaning. Kaplan (1977) uses the pair of terms “character”/ “content” instead of “meaning”/ “sense”. While the notion of “sense”, as I use it here, originates from Frege (1892), my meaning concept is exactly the opposite of Frege’s: Frege refers to the denotation of expressions with “meaning” [Ger. Bedeutung], deviating from the colloquial standard. [This is why Frege’s Bedeutung is usually rendered in English as “reference”.] Lewis (1972) uses “meaning” for yet another purpose, namely to refer to structured meanings (“hyperintensions”). — Caution is advised.
The classical treatment of context dependence is the “coordinate approach” of Lewis (1972). The two-dimensional representation of meaning is the basis of Stalnaker (1972), Kaplan (1977), (1979), Kratzer (1979), and others. [MP: In the 80’s, a new generation of context semantics has emerged: the closely related frameworks of Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp 1981) and File Change Semantics (Heim 1982), as well as Situation Semantics (Barwise/ Perry 1983). These theories emphasize a new dimension of meaning and its interaction with context. However, they are not of immediate relevance to the aspect of the context-meaning relationship addressed to in Part I and II of the book. In Part III, especially in the revised Chapter 8, I will treat them with more detail.]
The possible worlds concept was originally applied and developed in modal semantics (Kripke 1963). A good intuitive and formal introduction to possible worlds semantics is given in Cresswell (1973). (MP: In the early 80’s, a new discussion was initiated by Barwise and Perry’s fundamental criticism of the possible worlds concept, and this discussion continues today (Barwise (1989); Cresswell (1988).]
I will only occasionally go into questions of syntactic categorization in the following.
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© 1995 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Pinkal, M. (1995). Prerequisites and Fundamental Concepts. In: Pinkal, M. (eds) Logic and Lexicon. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 56. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8445-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8445-6_3
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