Attributives and their Modifiers
Attributives and their Modifiers
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定语及其修饰语
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发表时间：
1972
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通讯作者：
Samuel C. Wheeler
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作者：
Samuel C. Wheeler
下面的论文是对英语中谓词工作原理的哲学理论的初步语义学探讨。基本的项目是了解相当普通的“描述性”谓词是如何运作的，以及从语言教学和语言使用的角度来看，这种运作是否以及为什么是最佳的。我们打算用这篇论文的结果来解释英语中的模糊现象，以及如何使其与英语在某种程度上是一种一阶语言的观点相一致。这一项目的第一步，也是本文所尝试的，是揭示出现模糊词语的句子形式。定语形容词是不寻常的，这一点长期以来一直被人们认识和忽视。从亚里士多德开始，哲学家们就说过这样的话：“‘高个子’隐含着对一个参照类的指代”，但他们没有详细计算出他们的想法是什么，或者它如何适用于语言理论。这种粗略的处理是一种策略性的错误，本文在获得定语的一般语义理论的过程中提出了以下隐含的主张：1)定语的类别被认为包括了一些词，因为它们创造了内涵语境，所以在语义上肯定与标准定语有很大的不同。因此，例如，形式上排除了许多伦理和价值理论的特殊的“善”的语义问题被忽视了。这种疏忽的一个令人惊讶的例子出现在唐纳德·戴维森的书[4]中。2)被普遍视为一处谓词的“属性词”，如“红”，被详细的定语理论证明与“高”等范式定语具有相同的逻辑形式。如果“all”是一个双位置谓词，那么像“red”这样的词也一定是。这应该会让那些认为像“red”这样的词是通过对实例化的属性进行抽象来学习的人停下来。
The following paper is a semantical preliminary to a philosophical theory of the workings of predication in English. The basic project is to get a picture of how fairly ordinary "descriptive" predication operates and whether and why such an operation is optimal from a language-teaching and language-using point of view. We intend to use the results of this paper in giving a semantical account of the phenomenon of vagueness in English and how it can be made coherent with the view that English is a first-order language at some level of analysis. The first step in such a project, which this paper attempts, is to uncover the forms of sentences in which vague words occur. That attributive adjectives are unusual has long been recognized and ignored. Philosophers from Aristotle on have said things like, "'Tall' implicitly carries reference to a reference-class", without working out in detail what they have in mind or how it fits into a theory of language. That this glancing treatment is a strategic mistake is indicated by the following implicit claims the paper makes in the process of getting a general semantical theory of attributive adjectives: 1) The class of attributives has been taken to include words which, since they create intensional contexts, must be semantically very different in form from standard attributives. Thus, for instance, the special semantical problems of "good", which formally rule out many theories of ethics and value, have been ignored. A surprising example of such an oversight occurs in Donald Davidson's [4]. 2) The so-called "property-words", like "red", which have been universally treated as one-place predicates, are shown by a detailed theory of attributives to have the same logical form as paradigm attributives such as "tall". If "tall" is a two-place predicate, so must words like "red" be. This should give pause to people who think that words like "red" are learned by abstraction of instantiated properties.