Grammatical meaning and world knowledge

Following the guideline in (5) has lead to an approach to semantics in which an essential part of the meaning of expressions is not driven by the content of terms, but by how the terms are combined in syntax. With this approach, it becomes possible to account for the predicative and identity readings of copular construction with unified descriptions of the terms they are made of: the content of be and of the other elements need not be altered to provide an account of the two readings.

In fact, the analysis implies that the content of all terms is not equally relevant to the construction of meaning. Consider first the functional content be. This content is clearly essential in the construction of meaning: it provides a formal supports upon which different states of affairs are constructed. The specifics of these states of affairs, however, does not affect the content of be. This content remains identical in the two readings discussed, namely to introduce an entity that can be talked about.

On the other hand, the content (or denotation) of red and unusual appears to be irrelevant in the analysis: the formal distinction between the predicative and identity readings of be does not lie in the content attributed to these elements. For example, what expresses the distinction between the predicative readings (in (12) and (16)) and the identity readings (in (13) and (18)) has nothing to do with the actual content of red and unusual: the terms can be understood has having exactly the same contribution in the two readings. The difference stems from how they are combined to be.

At the propositional level, then, the denotation of these terms has no bearing on the account of the formal properties of the two readings. The formal aspects of the distinction are strictly expressed by the relation between the content of be and the meaningless indexes in (20):

(20) a. Predication (y)x b. Identity ( )

At first, this conclusion might seem to contradict the observation that in the sentences in (6), repeated here in (21), the denotation of the terms car, color and red is clearly instrumental in the fact that (21a) has a predicative reading, and (21b) an identity reading, as opposed to the other way around.

(21) a. Mary’s favorite car is red.

b. Mary’s favorite color is red.

However, the fact that the relation between the denotation of car, color and red correlates with the readings does not necessarily mean that the distinction itself is a function of denotation. There is another way to interpret the role of the denotation of car, color and red in the analysis of (21).

Suppose that substantive denotation belongs to a domain that lies outside of grammatical analysis, the domain of world (or conceptual) knowledge. Suppose that as far as semantic analysis is concerned, the role of denotation is one of “arbitration”: denotation has no relevance in the construction of meaning, but only assesses whether the semantic representations constructed at the propositional level can find a possible correspondent in the world (i.e., whether they can have a truth value). The semantics of the proposition would be the domain defined by functional content (the meaning of verbs, determiners, etc.) in conjunction with the meaning distinctions provided by syntax. Within this domain, abstract states of affairs (e.g., predication and identity) can be constructed independently of the denotation associated with substantive elements. When a substantive term is combined with functional content in syntax, its denotation is in a sense “located in” a state of affairs.

Whether a given state of affairs is “possible” or not will depend on the nature of the relation the denotation of the substantive elements in the clause have in the world. It is thus the

xy

Jacques Lamarche Be the One

10 Jacques Lamarche relation that the denotation of red has with the denotation of color and of car in this outside world that assesses that (21a) has a predicative reading and (21b) has an identity reading.

This analysis might seem to be redundant. If there is already a “world” in which the relevant relations are defined, and this world is required to assess whether the semantic representations constructed in the grammar are possible or not, why not directly use the distinctions from this world to describe the terms in the language? The answer relies on the methodological assumption in (5) that the ideal description of terms avoids contingent properties. If this methodological point of view is taken seriously, using distinctions drawn in this “world” to describe the terms is not possible. As was shown in section 3, the distinctions are contingent once inserted in certain grammatical contexts. The wide-spread use of type-shifting principles to adjust NP interpretation (see Partee 1987 for example) is testimony to the contingency of these notions.

Methodological considerations aside, there is a readily imaginable functional justification for this separation of world knowledge and grammatical knowledge, namely that it makes the grammatical system a perfect system with which to talk about or reflect on the world.

Grammar creates representations that mimic the type of situations that exists in the world (or perhaps, representations that mimic how we conceptualize these relations). Having the possibility to “package” these representations into a speech stream can certainly be seen as a rather useful cognitive faculty.

To come back to the role of denotation, what this means is that the fact that red denotes a property in the world cannot be taken as evidence that it is a predicate at the linguistic level². Describing substantive terms in this way amounts to using information that belongs to the outside world to describe objects that belong to the grammar. If the approach taken here is correct, it implies that formally, all substantive elements in the grammar can be treated as constants: each uniquely denotes a piece of knowledge which lies outside of grammatical knowledge. In theory, this constant can always be combined as a descriptor or an identifier. In practice, the denotation of a term constrains what states of affairs the construction can refer to, so that few terms can be effectively combined by the two rules in a given context.

Let me stress that the main point is not that the notions used to describe the denotational universe—for example, individual constants, predicate, sets, etc.—are totally irrelevant to semantic analysis. The point is that these notions do not belong to the level of linguistics semantics (as is argued in Bouchard, 1995 for example). Their relevance lies outside of linguistics proper, and they only become a factor for the analysis at a higher level of interpretation than the proposition (the level of discourse interpretation seems like a good candidate for this). In fact, the approach proposed here strongly suggests that the study of Grammar should provide a means to understand how human cognition organizes knowledge.

If truth value is indeed an indicator of the validity of relations that belong to world knowledge, then semantic representations build in syntax could be taken as reflecting how human cognition organizes information about world knowledge.

In the next section, I return to the discussion on the meaning of be, and discuss how the analysis that the verb only introduces an entity in the discourse provides an explanation for the fact that its locative use requires a prepositional phrase. This analysis provides further support for the idea that the denotation of substantive terms should be treated as part of a domain that lies outside of linguistic semantics.

2 A separation between “structural” semantics and a notion of meaning that belongs outside of it (call it lexical semantics) is generally taken for granted in formal semantics (see Partee, 1987 for a discussion). Under the view presented here, however, the practice of attributing type value to terms ends up not respecting this separation.

Jacques Lamarche Be the One

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Be the one 11

4 Be elsewhere

So far, the hypothesis that be introduces an entity in the discourse, in conjunction with the idea that syntax has a role in defining semantic notions, has provided a means to distingue the predicative and identity readings of copular constructions with unified descriptions. In this section, I want to discuss a few other uses of the verb, the existence use of be in 4.1 and its locative use in 4.2 This latter case illustrates how the distinction between grammar and world knowledge can be used to explain facts that might otherwise be considered arbitrary.

4.1 Be alone

The content assigned to be in the present analysis is in principle compatible for the examples in (4), repeated here in (24), where verb appears without a complement.

(22) a. To be or not to be.

b. I think, therefore I am.

c. Time does not seem to pass here: it just is. (from the Fellowship of the Ring) d. Time is, time was, time passed. (From The Manticore)

In this use, the sentence simply locates a subject in the discourse. However, given the description proposed for be, which makes no reference to an existential operator, why should this means existence?

It seems to me that this can just be an inference that follows from the fact that the argument of be is also a subject. A subject is the entity that is talked about, which presupposes its existence. Given that the verbs adds noting else about the entity it introduces, then the existence reading could simply arise as a result of the presupposition that the entity is already part of the discourse. If this approach is correct, a complete answer to the existential flavor of this reading would require a study that looks at the interaction of relevance theory, discourse analysis, and syntactic analysis, a topic that goes beyond the topic of the paper.

Let me provide a formal derivation of this use in order to make the relation between the verb and Tense marker explicit. Simplifying somewhat, let me assume that locating a state of affairs with respect to Tense is achieved by having a position relate to a temporal deictic marker. In doing so, any other element that relates to this position in the clause is also relating to this temporal information (see Bouchard, 1995 for a more articulate view of this idea, which is originally sketched in Lamarche, 1989). Depending on the Tense, the relation between the position and the marker is altered, being put in a difference sequence. In the present Tense, for example, the position would be directly aligned with the temporal marker.

Assuming that this marker is represented as a box, the result can be expressed as in (23).

(23) ( )

The important point for now is the assumption that the position that relates to the Tense marker is reserved for a specific element in the sentence, namely the subject. This means that the semantic representation of the expression time is in (22d) is constructed as in (22):

(24) ( )t

t ( ) Time is

This identify the entity time, which is located with respect to the moment of speech.

Evidently, this way of using be is highly limited. Given the reason why we talk–typically, to transmit information–sentences that only locates an entity in the discourse have very limited uses. Speakers generally do not spend much time talking about an entity for what it is, unless they are philosophers or writers. Because of this lack of informational content, be will tend to

Jacques Lamarche Be the One

12 Jacques Lamarche appear with a complement. In fact, in conjunction with a complement the content of be become highly useful: it provides a means to highlight a multitude of states of affairs pertaining to a single entity.

It should be clear by now that the restrictions on the complement that be selects cannot be defined at the lexical level. Many of these restrictions—essentially those related to the truth value of an expression given the nature of the denotation of substantive elements—reflect the process of arbitration discussed in section 3.4. As such, they are not a problem for linguistic analysis per see. There are aspects of the selection of complement, however, that do depend on the grammatical system, namely those that lead to the construction of states of affairs by the functional content of verbs and the rules of syntax. The next section presents one specific example of how to address this issue.