Functional logical semiotics of natural language

In the first part of my paper I briefly present Jerzy Pelc’s functional approach to logical semiotics of natural language. This approach focuses on the use of natural language expressions and on its dependence on context and conversational situation. One of the important goals of this analysis is to appreciate the role of sentences in natural language and stress that it is by means of sentences that language fulfills its main roles. However, for Pelc almost any expression can be used as a sentence, despite not being a grammatical sentence. In the second part I try to place Pelc’s standpoint within the framework of contemporary semantic minimalism – contextualism debate. I pay special attention to his treatment of subsentential expressions used to express propositions and argue that his view belongs to pragmatics-oriented approaches to subsentential speech acts.

Inferentialism, Context-Shifting and Background Assumptions

In this paper I present how the normative inferentialist can make the distinction between sentence meaning and content of the utterance. The inferentialist can understand sentence meaning as a role conferred to that sentence by the rules governing inferential transitions and content of the utterance as just a part of sentence meaning. I attempt to show how such a framework can account for prominent scenarios presented by contextualists as a challenge to semantic minimalism/literalism. I argue that inferentialism can address contextualist challenges in a simple and effective manner by understanding sentence meaning as broad, but invariant.

Gongsun Longzi’s “Form”: Minimal Word Meaning

Inspired by Gongsun Longzi’s “form-naming” idea about word meaning, this paper argues that 1) the internal lexicon contains only the list of word-meaning pairs, with no additional information either as part of word meaning or as a structural level above it; 2) the meaning of word is a minimal C-Form, the identifying conceptual meaning that individuates a concept; 3) C-Form is the interface between word meaning and concept meaning; and 4) a sentence has a minimal semantic content, consisting of the minimal meanings of the words composing it, which is propositional and truth-evaluable, and contextual elements contribute nothing to the meaning of language expressions. This paper adheres to semantic minimalism, believing meanwhile that meaning holism helps in semantics inquiry, since reflection on language meaning differs from language meaning itself.

Semantic content and compositional context-censitivity

A variety of theorists have recently argued against the explanation of the semantic content of a sentence as a minimal proposition claiming that intentional aspects of the context are often needed to obtain a minimal proposition. Minimalists such as Borg, however, still defend intention-insensitive minimal propositions for sentences in a narrow context and provide solutions or dissolutions against incompleteness objections. In this paper, we show that these putative defences of propositionalism do not serve to avoid some additional genuine objections which arise from compositional context-sensitivity. We aim to show that there are complex expressions which compositionally demand intention-sensitive pragmatic effects in a mandatory way and, for that reason, they provide us with evidence against the type of propositionalism that substantiates the defence of semantic minimalism.

Invisible minimalism

This essay attempts a rapprochement between Kent Bach’s view on semantic minimalism and the most radical version of contextualism about language on offer: Charles Travis’s occasion-sensitivity. Despite common assumptions held by defenders of semantic literalism – which cast Bach’s proposal as a form of contextualism – Bach rejects all conceivable forms of contextualism. In this paper, I argue that in spite of his systematic rejection of contextualism, Bach’s position bears a striking resemblance to Travis’s occasion-sensitivity. Further, when analyzed in light of the conceptual framework developed by Travis, Bach’s strand of minimalism can be shown to contain a deep-rooted conceptual inconsistency to the extent that he aims to ascribe “pure semantic content” to a linguistic entity that is necessarily pragmatic.

Contextualism and Semantic Minimalism

The debate between contextualists and semantic minimalists about meaning/content is one that matters most to philosophers of language, even though the debate is not solely a philosophical one. There are at least three ways of casting the debate. Firstly, it can be cast as one about how and when semantic and pragmatic mental resources are used during ordinary conversational exchanges. This debate utilizes theories and methodologies from psychology. Secondly, it can be framed in terms of the logic of natural languages and how to incorporate context sensitivity into a formal, compositional model of natural-language sentence-level meaning. Thirdly, it can be approached from an analytic philosophy of language perspective, with the aim of clarifying various crucial concepts, such as the concepts of saying and implicating, using a priori methods. Ideally, these domains of research will produce outcomes that cohere with each other. This essay surveys recent progress in these three domains.