On the Temporal Interpretation of Noun Phrases by Renate Musan

Author:Renate Musan [Musan, Renate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781000525151
Google: pkdOEAAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Garland Science
Published: 2021-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

5. Unrestrictive noun phrases that get temporally independent interpretations

I showed above that certain unrestrictive noun phrases can get temporally independent interpretations, namely subjects of existence-independent predicates. I will show here that the effects are not a problem under my account, but are in fact predicted by the stage-semantics I suggested in this chapter in combination with my account of life-time effects in Chapter II.

Recall from Chapter II that I distinguished stage-level predicates and individual-level predicates on the one hand from existence-independent predicates on the other hand. The crucial difference between the predicates is that stage-level predicates (e.g. available or sick) and individual-level predicates (e.g. altruistic or intelligent) impose life-time presuppositions on their subjects, but existence-independent predicates (e.g. famous or forgotten) do not.

Thus, Frege is intelligent is inappropriate for reasons of presupposition failure: we cannot predicate intelligent of Frege, because predicating intelligent of an individual presupposes that the individual is alive--and Frege is dead. Similarly, Frege is sick is inappropriate because Frege is dead and thus, the life-time presupposition of sick is not fulfilled.

But Frege is famous does not suffer from presupposition failure and is thus appropriate. Moreover, the sentence is judged true at present, because Frege is presently famous. Since famous can be predicated of people when they are dead, one can see that famous does not impose a life-time presupposition on its subject. For Frege is famous, the present tense of the clause locates the being famous at the time of utterance. The predicate famous denotes a relation between the individual Frege and some temporal (and perhaps spatial) location. This relation is independent of Frege’s life-time, so that we can use the sentence appropriately and truthfully to describe a situation like (83).

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