Three arguments for an individual concept analysis of specificational sentences
- PDF / 975,756 Bytes
- 22 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 95 Downloads / 174 Views
Three arguments for an individual concept analysis of specificational sentences Karlos Arregi1 · Itamar Francez1 · Martina Martinovi´c2
Received: 4 December 2019 / Accepted: 10 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Higgins (1973) famously distinguished between predicational and specificational interpretations of copular sentences. Since then, the literature has debated whether specificational interpretations exist and, if so, what they are. This paper contributes to this debate by providing three new arguments for recognizing specificational interpretations, and against the view, prevalent in the syntactic literature, that sentences with allegedly specificational readings actually involve predicational readings and a structure of predicate inversion. Our arguments support Romero’s (2005) analysis of specificational readings as involving individual concepts. Our discussion also demonstrates that the question of the semantics of specification is entirely independent of the question of whether the syntax of specification involves inversion or not. Keywords Copular sentences · Predication and predicate inversion · Individual concepts · Specificational sentences
1 Introduction Higgins’ (1973) well-known classification of nominal copular sentences (copular sentences in which the post-copular constituent is nominal) is based on interpretational
B K. Arregi
[email protected]
B I. Francez
[email protected]
B M. Martinovi´c
[email protected]
1
The University of Chicago, Chicago, USA
2
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
K. Arregi et al.
distinctions. It includes the distinction between predicational and specificational interpretations. The distinction is meant to apply to pairs of sentences like the one in (1), where (1a) is claimed to have a predicational interpretation, whereas (1b) is claimed to have a specificational one.1 The two readings, alas, do not come into sharp relief in these, and many other, examples.2 (1)
a. b.
Clara is a/the lawyer in the corruption case. The lawyer in the corruption case is Clara.
Predicational Specificational
Sentences like (1a) which have a predicational interpretation according to Higgins, henceforth predicational sentences, are considered to be relatively straightforward. There is wide consensus that, at a certain level of description, this interpretation is the same as that of copular sentences in which the main predicate is an adjective or a prepositional phrase. The subject noun phrase (e.g. Clara) denotes, or quantifies over, individuals, and the post-copular noun phrase (e.g. a/the lawyer in the corruption case) expresses a property of individuals.3 Within a standard model-theoretic framework, and stated in set-theoretical terms, the sentence has the truth condition that the denotation of the subject is an element of that of the post-copular noun phrase, or vice versa in the case of quantification. Nominal copular sentences such as (1b), which according to Higgins have a distinct, specificational reading, and which are known in the
Data Loading...
