What an Average Semantics Needs
What an Average Semantics Needs
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平均语义需要什么
DOI：
10.3765/salt.v18i0.2513
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发表时间：
2008
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
J. Stanley
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Christopher Kennedy;J. Stanley
(1a-b) 的神秘之处在于它们似乎是真实的，尽管世界上没有人可以作为名词短语 theaverageAmerican 和averageFreddieVoter 的参考，并且世界上没有人拥有 2.3 个孩子。 (1c) 提出了类似的观点，尽管方式有些不同：虽然每年看医生 7.5 次的属性与拥有 2.3 个孩子的属性并不矛盾，但 (1c) 的真相并不让我们相信任何实际拥有此属性的个人的存在。语言学家和哲学家都使用普通句子得出各种戏剧性的结论。例如，诺伯特·霍恩斯坦（Norbert Hornstein）和诺姆·乔姆斯基（Noam Chomsky）使用此类句子来论证语义理论没有利用指称关系，即单词和事物之间的关系（Hornstein 1984，Chomsky 2000）。同样，一些哲学家用这些句子来论证单数指称在本体论上并不成立。这样的结论实在是太仓促了。那些根据普通句子的语义或本体论承诺的性质得出戏剧性结论的人不公平地利用了此类句子缺乏组合语义的情况。在本文中，我们提供了第一个这样的语义。此外，我们表明，在语义的指称方法中，人们可以提供这些结构的详细组合语义，从而揭示许多特定的语言兴趣。具体来说，平均句子提供了新的证据，表明自然语言的构成系统必须允许范围获取术语的核心范围可以作为第三个表达式的参数，而不是范围获取术语本身，这种关系被 Barker (2007) 称为寄生范围。
The mystery of (1a-b) is that it seems that they can be true, even though there is no person in the world that is the reference of the noun phrases the average American and the average Freddie Voter, and no person in the world that has 2.3 children. (1c) makes a similar point, though in a somewhat different fashion: while the property of seeing one’s doctor 7.5 times per year is not incoherent in the same way as the property of having 2.3 children, the truth of (1c) does not commit us to the existence of any individuals who actually have this property. Both linguists and philosophers have used average sentences to draw dramatic conclusions of various sorts. For example, Norbert Hornstein and Noam Chomsky have used this class of sentences to argue that semantic theory does not exploit a reference relation, a relation between words and things (Hornstein 1984, Chomsky 2000). Similarly, some philosophers have used these sentences to argue that singular reference is not ontologically committing. Such conclusions are far too hasty. Those who based dramatic conclusions about the nature of semantics or ontological commitment on average sentences are unfairly exploiting the lack of a compositional semantics for sentences of this sort. In this paper, we provide the first such semantics. Moreover, we show that within the referential approach to semantics one can provide a detailed compositional semantics of these constructions that reveals much of specific linguistic interest. Specifically, average sentences provide new evidence that the compositional system of natural language must allow for the possibility that the nuclear scope of of a scope-taking term may serve as the argument of a third expression, rather than the scope-taking term itself, a relation that Barker (2007) refers to as PARASITIC SCOPE.
DOI：
10.3765/salt.v17i0.2958
发表时间：
2007-10
期刊：
Semantics and Linguistic Theory
影响因子：
--
作者：
R. Bhatt;Shoichi Takahashi
通讯作者：
R. Bhatt;Shoichi Takahashi
DOI：
--
发表时间：
2008
期刊：
影响因子：
--
作者：
大津由紀雄;今西典子
通讯作者：
今西典子