Table Of ContentPursuing Meaning
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Pursuing Meaning
E MMA B ORG
1
3
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© Emma Borg 2012
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First Edition published in 2012
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ISBN 978-0-19-958837-4
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MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn
For Jim, Ted, and Alfi e.
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Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments x xiii
1 S urveying the Terrain 1
(1) M inimal semantics 3
(2) C ontext-shifting arguments 16
(3) T he current positions in logical space 18
(4) R eassessing the middle ground 29
2 M inimal Semantics and Psychological Evidence 48
( 1) M inimalism and what is said 49
(2) T he relationship between semantics and psychology? 52
(3) T he objection: psychological evidence runs counter
to the theories 56
(4) T he response 62
(5) D isagreements and agreements 6 4
3 P ropositionalism and Some Problem Cases 73
(1) T he challenge to propositionalism 7 4
(2) N on-minimalist responses to the problem cases 76
(3) M inimalist responses to the problem cases 81
4 I ntention-Sensitive Expressions 112
(1) T he problem of semantically relevant intentions 112
(2) R ejecting (P1): conventionalism about reference 115
(3) R ejecting (P2): non-inferentialism 122
(4) R ejecting the argument: distinguishing reference fi xing,
reference identifi cation, and semantic content 134
(5) C onclusion 1 40
5 T he Ontological Argument Against Minimal
Word Meanings 1 43
(1) S emantic minimalism and Chomsky’s semantic internalism 1 46
(2) T he arguments against minimal word meanings 151
viii contents
(3) R ejecting the arguments against minimal word meanings 156
(4) C onclusion 164
6 T he Methodological Argument Against Minimal
Word Meanings 1 65
(1) T he intra-linguistic burden for semantics 166
(2) T he thin approach to carrying the intra-linguistic burden 174
(3) T he thick approach to carrying the intra-linguistic burden:
lexical complexity 176
(4) F odor and Lepore’s objections to lexical complexity 183
(5) O rganization of the lexicon 191
(6) M inimal semantics and organizational lexical semantics 202
(7) C onclusion 213
Bibliography 217
Index 229
Preface
This book examines some recent answers to the questions of how and
where to draw the divide between semantics (roughly, features of the
literal meaning of linguistic items) and pragmatics (roughly, features
emerging from the context within which such items are being used). In
particular, this book attempts a defence of what is commonly known as
‘minimal semantics’ (aka ‘semantic invariantism’ or ‘insensitive seman-
tics’). Minimal semantics, as the name suggests, wants to off er a pretty
minimal account of the inter-relation between semantics and pragmat-
ics. Specifi cally, it holds that while context can aff ect literal semantic
content in the case of genuine (i.e. lexically or syntactically marked)
context-sensitive expressions (e.g. indexicals, demonstratives, tense
markers), this is pretty much the limit of pragmatic input to semantic
content.1 On all other occasions where context of utterance appears to
aff ect content the minimalist claims that what it aff ects is not literal,
semantic content but what the speaker conveys by the use of this literal
content—it aff ects what a speaker says not what a sentence means. So
minimalists are fond of making claims along the following lines: the
sentence ‘Snow is white’ means that snow is white, the sentence ‘Ted is
ready’ expresses the proposition that T ed is ready, and the sentence ‘there
is nothing to eat’ is true iff there is nothing to eat. For the minimalist, then,
the semantic content of these sentences is not (as some theorists con-
tend) a pragmatically enriched content such as s now is white in some
contextually determined respect, or Ted is ready to play football, or there is noth-
ing appropriate to eat in the kitchen . Though a speaker may convey a more
complex content such as one of these, this is held to be a feature of
pragmatic speaker meaning not semantic sentence meaning.
Notice that minimalism does not claim that pragmatics has no eff ects
on semantics. This claim has been made (e.g. see Katz 1977 , and more
recently G arcia-Carpintero 2 006 ) and indeed, depending on how we
defi ne our terms here (a point I’ll return to in C hapter 1 ) this can be seen
1 The qualifi cation ‘pretty much’ is to allow for pre-semantic pragmatic processes, like word disam-
biguation; see Borg 2004a, Chapter 2 .
