Pietroski Papers

“Paul Pietroski”:http://www.wam.umd.edu/~pietro/ lists among his “papers”:http://www.wam.umd.edu/~pietro/research/papers/index.htm the following:

bq. Function and Concatenation (in Logical Form, edited by G. Preyer and G. Peters, OUP 2002).
Explores the idea that concatenating natural language expressions corresponds to predicate-conjunction, as opposed to function-application. The proposal is developed in more detail in Events and Semantic Architecture (forthcoming, OUP). But the paper gives the main idea, in the context of questions about how natural language syntax is related to Logical Form.

bq. Monadic Determiners: Quantification and Thematic Separation DRAFT: January, 2003
This draft of a (long) paper, a kind of companion piece to “Function and Concatenation,” provides an account of quantification in natural language based on the idea that determiners (like ‘every’, ’some’, ‘most’, etc.) aresemantically monadic predicates. A detailed outline of the paper is available. But the basic idea is this: if we treat transitive action verbs as predicates of events, we can think of events as special cases of “things with participants;” and we can treat determiners as predicates of such things, without saying that determiners are satisfied by (pairs of) plural entities, given the right understanding of second-order logic. The paper draws heavily on George Boolos’ work.

bq. The Character of Natural Language Semantics
(to appear in Epistemology of Language, edited by Alex Barber, OUP). Argues against the idea that a compositional semantics for a natural language will have theorems that specify the truth-conditions of sentences (relative to contexts).  Typically, sentences don’t have truth-conditions, not even relative to (theoretically tractable) contexts. And typically, the truth-conditions of utterances are not compositionally determined. Truth conditions often depend on theoretically intractable aspects of conversational situations. So the meaning of a sentence isn’t a function from contexts to truth-conditions. Linguistic meanings are, as Chomsky has long urged, more “internal” than many philosophers think.

bq. Does Every Sentence Like This Exhibit A Scope Ambiguity? coauthored with Norbert Hornstein
(in Belief and Meaning, edited by W. Hinzen and H. Rott, Hansel-Hohenhausen 2002)
The answer is ‘no’. Instances of ‘every F likes some G’ may not, after all, be examples of scope ambiguity. Figuring out whether a given expression with multiple quantifiers is semantically ambiguous is hard.

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