Jessica Rett. “Context, Compositionality and Calamity”, to appear in Mind & Language.
Abstract. This paper examines an attempt made in a series of articles (Stanley 2002, a.o.) to create a syntactic placeholder for contextual information. The initial shortcoming of Stanley’s proposal is that it does not easily integrate these placeholders with domain-restricting information syntactically encoded elsewhere in the utterance. Thus, Stanley erroneously predicts that a sentence in which quantifier- restricting information encoded in (for example) a prepositional phrase conflicts with quantifier-restriction valued by context is internally incoherent. I continue by exploring the space of possible solutions to this problem that are available to Stanley, demonstrating how each of these possible solutions results in its own interpretation problem and, ultimately, fails. In doing so, I argue that Stanley’s syntactic/semantic approach to context is ultimately untenable.
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This entry was posted by fintel on Thursday, May 26th, 2005, at 8:51 am.
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