words and thoughts subsentences ellipsis and the philosophy of language oct 2006

[...]... sentences) can be used to state complete thoughts, and what the answer to this question entails about the general issue of how language (i.e ‘ words ’) relates to thinking (i.e ‘ thoughts ’) It is these two issues about words and thoughts that give rise to the title of the book The next chapter addresses three issues that will otherwise lie in the background The first involves a conceptual distinction... sentences on the one hand and words and phrases on the other Words and phrases do not have syntactic mood And, since I am talking about perfectly ordinary words and phrases, i.e the kind that embed in sentences, they also do not exhibit distinctive intonation So, there is no formal feature on words/ phrases that carries forceExp Hence they do not have it Their content is not bipartite in the way sentence... assuming that these Frege-inspired doctrines are not falsified by the use of subsentences, at a minimum the phenomenon of sub-sentential speech acts calls for a careful examination of what exactly is being claimed by proponents of sentence primacy, in the guise of the just-presented semantic and metasemantic doctrines For, if words and phrases can be used and understood on their own, why think that they do... placing below the resulting nodes particular items of the appropriate category Importantly, there are two types of category variables On the one hand, there are the lexical categories These include Noun, Verb, 14 Appearances and Background Preposition, Adjective, and Adverb Lexical categories dominate open classes of words; classes to which new members can be freely added On the other hand, there are non-lexical... in the X-bar schema we arrive at (3), the general form of sentences.⁸ (Elsewhere in the grammar, it is stated that the specifier of I is some kind of nominal, and that the complement of I is something verbal.) (3) The general form of sentences S NP I′ INFL VP By filling in particular formatives under NP, INFL, and VP, we produce a specific sentence For instance, taking [NP The Queen of England] as the. .. ‘sentence’ in Stainton (2000) See also Ch 2 Introduction 21 genuine there is an important gap between the meaning of the things used in the act and the nature and content of the act itself The issue of the truth of P2, i.e what implications this might have, then becomes pressing Speaking of which, I now want to rehearse briefly some of those alleged implications 1 4 P O S S I B L E I M P L I C AT I... they the types—have the forceExp of asking questions as part of their content These two examples highlight another point about forceExp , namely the issue of which things encode it (Being a kind of content itself, forceExp does not encode content; it is encoded.) Sentences have their forceExp because of the mood they exhibit—where by ‘mood’ I mean syntactic features like word order, and the presence of. .. categories Of particular interest in understanding the sentence versus non-sentence contrast is the category INFL INFL contributes the inflectional morphology of the verb (e.g subject–verb agreement), tense markers (e.g PAST) and any infinitival markers (e.g ‘to’ in English) In English, the INFL node also dominates a closed class of words, consisting of the aspectual auxiliaries (‘have’ and ‘be’) and the models... sentence content is Of course, this is not to say that speech acts made with words and phrases lack forceAct Indeed, it is part of the description of the appearances that there are speech acts with forceAct made with ordinary words and phrases The point, rather, is that the items used do not have forceExp in the way that the following sentences all do (6) (a) (b) (c) ForceExp and syntactic mood in... Put in terms of these examples, the additional difference is this The content of the three sentences above is bipartite: part of their content is a proposition, the other part is a forceExp The first sentence, the syntactic type, has as its nonpropositional content assertoric force; the second sentence type has interrogatival force as this part of its context-insensitive content; and the third has .