Generics: some (non) specifics

This paper is about an underappreciated aspect of generics: their non-specificity. Many uses of generics, utterances like ‘Seagulls swoop down to steal food’, express non-specific generalisations which do not specify their quantificational force or flavour. I consider whether this non-specificity arises as a by-product of context-sensitivity or semantic incompleteness but argue instead that generics semantically express non-specific generalisations by default as a result of quantifying existentially over more specific ones.

‘Wang’s Paradox’

This chapter, specially written for the 2007 Schilp volume in his honour, revisits Sir Michael Dummett’s seminal contribution to the debates about vagueness in his ipsonymous 1975 paper. The chapter again rejects both the conception of vagueness as any kind of semantic incompleteness and Epistemicism, and critiques Dummett’s own suggestion of Incoherentism, returning again to the governing view and the question of the sense, if any, in which vague expressions should be thought of as governed by semantic rules. The Sorites for phenomenal predicates, ‘looks red’ and its ilk, receives special focus. It is argued that the correct response is that the competent use of these and other vague expressions is, in a certain sense, unprincipled: their vagueness is a phenomenon of reactive judgement unsupported by reasons. This conception enforces Agnosticism about Bivalence and a consequent repudiation of the validity of double negation elimination.

THE PECULIARITIES OF INCOMPLETE SENTENCES IN MODERN ENGLISH

The issue of incomplete sentences has been long attracted more scientists. There were no special works devoted to incomplete sentences. The main significant research of this matter were the thesis of A.N.Nazarov and the work of I.A.Popova. I.A.Popova, at the conclusion of her work, comes to the pessimistic conclusion that it is impossible to give a satisfactory definition of incomplete sentences based on a grammatical structure, as well as the impossibility of putting forward clear criteria for dividing sentences into complete and incomplete[1].This conclusion largely depended on the fact that the definition of incompleteness for a long time was based not on structural-grammatical, but on semantic features. So A.N.Nazarov believed that semantic incompleteness allows defining incomplete sentences and their criteria. Since these conclusions were made, the issue of incomplete sentences and many other problems related to it were investigated thoroughly. Nevertheless, many questions of the theory of incomplete sentences still remain unresolved, their structure and peculiarities, also the relationship between various linguistic factors have not been completely clarified.

La phraséologie: cotexte, contexte et contenus culturels

<p>The aim of this paper is to show that most of the research on phraseology has focused in recent decades on the syntax that governs both internal and external combinatorics. The semantic analyses have been limited to semantism excluding co(n)text. In this article, we try to show how phraseologisms, as units of the third articulation of language, have the inherent semantic trait of a semantic incompleteness which complement cotexts and contexts. In addition, there is very little research into the cultural dimension.</p>

Lying and Insincerity

This book is a comprehensive study of lying and insincere language use. Part I is dedicated to developing an account of insincerity qua linguistic phenomenon. It provides a detailed theory of the distinction between lying and ways of speaking insincerely without lying, as well as accounting for the relation between lying and deceiving. A novel theory of assertion in terms of a notion of what is said defined relative to questions under discussion is used to underpin the analysis of lying and insincerity throughout the book. The framework is applied to various kinds of insincere speech, including false implicature, bullshitting, and forms of misleading with presuppositions, prosodic focus, and different types of semantic incompleteness. Part II discusses the relation between what is communicated and the speaker’s attitudes involved in insincere language use. It develops a view on which insincerity is a shallow phenomenon in the sense that whether or not a speaker is being insincere depends on the speaker’s conscious attitudes, rather than on deeper, unconscious attitudes or motivations. An account of a range of ways of speaking while being indifferent toward what one communicates is developed, and the phenomenon of bullshitting is distinguished from lying and other forms of insincerity. This includes insincere uses of language beyond the realm of declarative sentences. The book gives an account of insincere uses of interrogative, imperative, and exclamative utterances.

Indeterminacy, Incompleteness, Indecision, and Other Semantic Phenomena

This paper explores the relationships between Davidson's indeterminacy of interpretation thesis and two semantic properties of sentences that have come to be recognized recently, namely semantic incompleteness and semantic indecision. More specifically, I will examine what the indeterminacy thesis entails for sentences of the form ‘By sentence S (or word w), agent A means that m’ and ‘Agent A believes that p.’ My primary goal is to shed light on the indeterminacy thesis and its consequences. I will distinguish two kinds of indeterminacy that have very different sources and very different consequences. But this does not purport to be an exhaustive study: there may well be other forms of indeterminacy that this paper does not address.I will first explain the phenomena of semantic incompleteness and semantic indecision, and then explore their relationships with the indeterminacy thesis.