Terence Parsons

Word Meaning and Montague Grammar

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The progressive in English: Events, states and processes

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Some Problems Concerning the Logic of Grammatical Modifiers

This paper has two goals. The first is to formulate an adequate account of the semantics of the progressive aspect in English: the semantics of ‘Agatha is making a cake’, as opposed to ‘Agatha makes a cake’. This account presupposes a version of the so-called “Aristotelian” classification of verbs in English into EVENT, PROCESS and STATE verbs. The second goal of this paper is to refine this classification so as to account for the infamous “category switch” problem, the problem of how it is that modification of a verb like ‘run’ by an adverbial like ‘to the store’ can turn a PROCESS phrase (‘run’) into an EVENT phrase (‘run to the store’). Views discussed include those of Aqvist, Bach, Bennett, Bennett and Partee, Dowry, Montague and Scott, and Vendler.

Assertion, denial, and the Liar Paradox

This paper consists principally of selections from a much longer work on the semantics of English. It discusses some problems concerning how to represent grammatical modifiers (e.g. ‘slowly’ in ‘x drives slowly’) in a logically perspicuous notation. A proposal of Reichenbachs is given and criticized; then a ‘new’ theory (apparently discovered independently by myself, Romain Clark, and Richard Montague and Hans Kamp) is given, in which grammatical modifiers are represented by operators added to a first-order predicate calculus. Finally some problems concerning applications of adjectives to that-clauses and gerundive-clauses are discussed.

An Analysis of Mass Terms and Amount Terms

In 1919, in the essay “Negation” (Frege, 1919), Frege addresses the issue of whether there are two distinct ways of judging affirmative judging and negative judging or only one. His answer, which is widely accepted nowadays, is that there is only one kind of judgment affirmative judgment and that the rejection of a proposition is always accomplished by accepting or affirming some ofher proposition, namely, the negation of the proposition being rejected. For example, we reject the claim that the accused was in Rome at the time of the murder by accepting the different claim that the accused was nor in Rome at the time of the murder (Frege, 1919, pp. 129-130). Frege argues further that negation itself is always part of the content of a judgment, and never forms part of the judgmental act or attitude. Frege’s views are very different from certain earlier views, such as those of the Port Royal Logic (Arnauld, 1662). In that work, a judgment that the accused was nor in Rome at the time of the murder would have the very same content as the corresponding positive judgment. The difference between the positive and negative judgments would lie in the judging activities themselves, not in their contents. The negative aspect of a negative judgment would be part of the act, not part of the content. There is a parallel issue in the philosophy of language (also discussed by Frege): Are there two distinct types of illocutionary acts assertion and denial or only one? The Fregean answer is that there is only one assertion and that a linguistic denial of a proposition is always effected by means of asserting the negation of that proposition. Further, in Austinian terms, negation is always part of the locutionary content of a speech act, and never part of the illocutionary force (Austin, 1962). In Hare’s terms, negation is always to be located in the phrastic, never in the neustic (Hare, 1952).

Things That are Right with the Traditional Square of Opposition

A mass term is a term like ‘water’, ‘gold’, ‘information’, ‘green ink’, ‘green ink which has been diluted’, etc. The first three of these, ‘water’, ‘gold’, and ‘information’ are simple mass nouns; the others are complex terms built up from mass nouns plus modifiers. Strictly speaking, it is occurrences of words, or something of the sort, which count as mass nouns, for the same word can occur both as a mass noun and as a count noun. For example, ‘chicken’ is a mass noun in ‘I had some chicken for dinner’, or in ‘We had chicken for dinner’; it is a count noun in ‘Our cat caught a chicken’ and in ‘Some chickens got into the garden’. In the sentence ‘I looked, but I saw no chicken’, the word ‘chicken’ is ambiguous between its count noun sense (‘I didn’t see any chickens’) and its mass noun sense (‘I didn’t see any chicken (meat)’). The task of giving complete and explicit criteria for isolating out mass nouns is a detailed task which I will ignore here; I will assume enough competence at recognizing mass nouns to evaluate the analysis given below.2

Meaning Sensitivity and Grammatical Structure

Abstract.The truth conditions that Aristotle attributes to the propositions making up the traditional square of opposition have as a consequence that a particular affirmative proposition such as ‘Some A is not B’ is true if there are no Bs. Although a different convention than the modern one, this assumption remained part of centuries of work in logic that was coherent and logically fruitful.

MEINONGIAN SEMANTICS GENERALIZED

The topic of this talk is the semantics of natural language. This is an area of investigation that today merges work in linguistics with work in philosophy. In linguistics there is a going enterprise in the study of the syntax of natural language, coupled with a methodological goal of studying semantics as well. In philosophy there is a going enterprise in the study of semantical issues, without a great deal of regard for the syntax of natural language. The two enterprises — the study of syntax by linguists and the study of semantics by philosophers, or by linguists working within philosophical frameworks — proceed mostly on parallel tracks, informed by one another, but not frequently very tightly linked. Part of the success of Montague Grammar was that Montague’s essays linked them completely. But Montague was a layman in syntax, and so Montague Grammar remains mostly a semantical enterprise. There are a number of people who would try to link these two enterprises more closely. That is the topic of my talk today — a problem about whether and how that linkage might be established. The particular issue I will focus on I call ‘meaning sensitivity’.

The doctrine of distribution

Alexius Meinong was an analytic philosopher in his methodology, and his techniques are ones that we are comfortable with. He takes a body of plausible data, argues carefully regarding his subject matter, and is willing to go where the data and arguments lead. In his theory of objects he developed an account of a domain of objects that transcend those we normally take for granted. In this paper I propose to take a look at what we can learn from an attempt to generalize these investigations from the point of view of philosophy of language. So this is what happens when a philosopher of language looks at Meinong, and sees something of interest for semantics.

RUSSELL'S EARLY VIEWS ON DENOTING

Peter Geach describes the ‘doctrine of distribution’ as the view that a term is distributed if it refers to everything that it denotes, and undistributed if it refers to only some of the things that it denotes. He argues that the notion, so explained, is incoherent. He claims that the doctrine of distribution originates from a degenerate use of the notion of ‘distributive supposition’ in medieval supposition theory sometime in the 16th century. This paper proposes instead that the doctrine of distribution occurs at least as early as the 12th century, and that it originates from a study of Aristotles notion of a terms being ‘taken universally’, and not from the much later theory of distributive supposition. A detailed version of the doctrine found in the Port Royal Logic is articulated, and compared with a slightly different modern version. Finally, Geachs arguments for the incoherence of the doctrine are discussed and rejected.