Roots, naming, and locality: The structure of name predicates

2018

This construction is similar to one type of nominal predication in the language, but shows different restrictions: only nouns that indicate spans of time or distance appear in the construction, and the ‘from/since’ phrase is required. Furthermore, the verb bi ‘be’ would be unexpected a case of nominal predication without an accompanying inflected preposition. Scottish Gaelic has also been claimed not to have expletive pronouns (McCloskey 1996; cf. Adger 2011). In this paper I argue the following: the pronoun in this construction is in fact referential, rather than pleonastic, and refers to the span described by the accompanying nominal; the nominal forms a predicate by merging with a null classifier that is only semantically compatible with roots that have an interpretation in the context of [SPAN];

Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos , 2022

While the predicate view of proper names is popular among linguists, it is not unanimous. This paper contributes to the discussion by considering some linguistic data exemplified by phrases such as “Operation Valkyrie” and “Operation Desert Storm”. These examples bring some clues about the structure of the phrasesthat help us understand the procedure involved in naming individuals. One is the gap between the first constituent (“operation”) and the second constituent (“Valkyrie”),which is filled by an abstract functional structure, as will be argued in this paper. These clues also lead us into two consequences: a) the difference between a definite description and a proper name is not so clear; b) the naming procedure is enabled by a complex syntactic-semantic mechanism within this gap.Our analysis shows that the predicate view provides accurate results for the data under analysis.

2012

This research proposes a unified approach to the semantics of the so-called bare nominals, which include proper names (e.g., Mary), mass and plural terms (e.g., water, cats), and articleless noun phrases in Japanese. I argue that bare nominals themselves are monadic predicates applicable to more than one particular, but they can constitute complex referential phrases when located within an appropriate linguistic environment. Bare nominals used as the subjects or objects of sentences are some or other variant of definite descriptions, which are analyzed as non-quantificational, referential expressions. The overarching thesis is that the semantic properties of bare nominal expressions such as rigidity are not inherent in the words themselves, but derived from the basic features of complex nominal phrases.

2004

Van Geenhoven 1995). The proposal that noun phrases in argument positions might denote properties is perhaps surprising at first. If verbs and similar predicates are assumed to denote functions on individuals, and if the fundamental semantic composition rule available is functor-argument application, NPs would seem to have to be interpreted as either entity-or quantifier-denoting. It is not obvious, under these assumptions, how an NP which denotes a property can compose semantically with the predicate that selects for it.

A main selling point of Predicativism is that, in addition to accounting for predicative uses of proper names, it can successfully account for their referential uses while treating them as predicates, thus providing a uniform semantics for proper names. The strategy is to postulate an unpronounced determiner that is realised with names when they appear to function as singular terms, making them effectively a concealed determiner phrase. I argue against the thesis that names are really predicates in referential uses. I discuss four different environments where names do not behave like the determiner phrases that are thought to embed them.

Linguistics and Philosophy, 2009

Ionin for the discussion and suggestions, to various linguists who provided data on various more or less exotic languages and will be individually named (though not called or baptized) below. I would also like to thank the audiences at NELS 35, Sinn und Bedeutung 9, UCLA syntax and semantics seminar, MIT syntax-semantics reading group, and seminars of volet VP de la Fédération TUL (CNRS/Université Paris 8), Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main, Institut Jean Nicod, PALMYR and CRISSP for their attention and helpful comments, and, last but not the least, the three anonymous reviewers of Linguistics and Philosophy, whose detailed comments greatly improved this paper.

Philosophical Studies, 2017

In this paper I argue that a descriptive content associated with a proper name can serve as a truth-conditionally relevant adjunct and be an additional contribution of the name into the truth-conditions. Definite descriptions the so-and-so associated by speakers with a proper name can be used as qualifying prepositional phrases as so-and-so, so the sentences containing a proper name NN is doing something could be understood as NN is doing something as NN (which means as so-and-so). Used as an adjunct, the descriptive content of a proper name expresses the additional circumstances of action (a manner, reason, goal, time or purpose) and constitute a part of a predicate. I argue that qualifying prepositional phrases should be analyzed as predicate modifiers and propose a formal representation of modified predicates. The additional truth-conditional relevance of the descriptive content of a proper name helps to explain the phenomenon of substitution failure of coreferential names in simple sentences (The Superman Puzzle).

NELS 52: Proceedings of the fifty-second annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, volume two, 2022

This paper contributes to the debate regarding the semantic type of singular referential names. According to one view, known as referentialism, names rigidly designate individuals (Kripke 1972, Abbott 2002, Leckie 2013, Jeshion 2015, Schoubye 2017). According to another view, known as predicativism, names designate properties of individuals (Burge 1973, Geurts 1997, Bach 2002, Elbourne 2005, Matushansky 2008, Fara 2015). Most predicativist accounts claim that bare names in English occur with a phonologically null determiner, a proposal that is based on languages like Greek where names require a determiner in argument position. Novel data from both English and Greek show that names can be nonrigid designators under modal operators ("Aristotle may teach Socrates") and bound variables under quantifiers ("in every set of twins, Helen is a musician"), challenging referentialism. As for rigidity, one possible source of this phenomenon is the proprial article, a name-specific determiner found in Catalan and other languages that may be null in English and homophonous with the definite article in Greek (Ghomeshi and Massam 2009, Muñoz 2019, Izumi and Erickson 2021). While much further research is needed, the data suggest that the proper analysis of names is grounded in predicativism rather than referentialism.

Dialectica, 2000

This paper embeds a theory of proper names in a general approach to singular reference based on type-free property theory. It is proposed that a proper name “N” is a sortal common noun whose meaning is essentially tied to the linguistic type “N”. Moreover, “N” can be singularly referring insofar as it is elliptical for a definite description of the form the “N” Following Montague, the meaning of a definite description is taken to be a property of properties. The proposed theory fulfils the major desiderata stemming from Kripke's works on proper names.