A Minimalist View on the Syntax–Semantics Relationship by Jakielaszek Jarosław

Author:Jakielaszek, Jarosław
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Peter Lang AG
Published: 2017-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Taking interpretive consequences of such a view into account, Kaplan (1973) considers an alternative according to which we ‘continue to think of things as before, but take the assemblages themselves as the values of the variables and constants’ (Kaplan 1973: 504). Such discussions thus offer frameworks for a philosophical analysis, either developed with a very specific issue in view or intended as an all-encompassing general proposal which admits of further refinements suited to particular needs—as Belnap and Müller (2014a,b), Belnap (2014), wherein the nature of the objects of the domain is ultimately entirely left undetermined (which it may be in virtue of the specific setup of the procedure of interpretation), and which is devised so as to allow inter alia comparisons of different views on ← 98 | 99 → persistence and its criteria (see Müller (2012) for such a discussion, and Müller (2014) for an application of the framework in the philosophy of science)—and examples may be easily multiplied, belonging basically more to philosophical logic than to the linguistic tradition of formal semantics, the distinction between stage-level and individual-level predication mentioned above being one of few exceptions (handled in various ways, see Diesing (1992a,b), Musan (1995, 1997, 1999), Krifka et al. (1995) and Kratzer (1995) for classical discussions). To be sure, the apparatus used to capture the difference in semantic properties of sentences built around predicates belonging to these two classes does not seem to be of much general use in the theory of the syntax-semantics relationship, involving differences in syntactic structure and/or specific principles resulting from requirements of particular predicates, not to mention the enrichment of the ontology of the model-theoretic side—all this seemed quite parochial, nothing of the sort expected if general syntactic or semantic principles were to be found or explained; in the minimalist setting, such worries may be only more pertinent and constitute more of an obstacle against incorporating such distinctions into the main theoretical machinery. Doubts gain even more force when one notes that the discussion revolves around the distinction between stages and individuals understood in temporal terms, analogous distinction in the modal (‘world-modal’) realm being at least questionable, if at all intelligible in the standard Kripkean setting, wherein it is rather the notion of transworld identification that is at stake. It is, again, accidental that the debate about transworld identity had been already abandoned by the time that the syntactic theory of chains was being developed—in contrast to the period of intense discussion concerning possibilities of identification of individuals across possible worlds, the problem by and large lost its charm by the early 80’s, and making his classical paper of 1967 (a ‘locus classicus of the views I am criticizing,’ says Kripke (1980: 45 n. 14), and Kaplan (1978) is happy to invoke this statement, concealing the identity of its author as ‘the leading modal logician of our time,’ Kaplan (1978: 88 note)) available in print, Kaplan (1978) both considered it ‘anachronistic’ and recanted his earlier views. Given both this and the original

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