Unarticulated Constituents and Theories of Meaning

<p>This work is an investigation into a phenomenon introduced by John Perry that I call ‘totally unarticulated constituents.’ These are entities that are part of the propositional content of a speech act, but are not represented by any part of the sentence uttered or of the thought that is being expressed - that is, they are fully unarticulated. After offering a novel definition of this phenomenon, I argue that totally unarticulated constituents are attested in natural language, and may in fact be quite common. This raises fatal problems for a prominent theory of underspecification defended by Jason Stanley, according to which all context- sensitivity (including unarticulated constituents) can be traced to covert variables in the syntax. I then use these findings to draw out important lessons for the philosophy of language, including a rejection of a long-standing Gricean issue known as the “meaning- intention problem.” I also explore the dialectic between Paul Grice’s intention-based semantics and Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics, arguing that Millikan’s perception-based response to the problem of underspecification is untenable unless it is modified to give prominence to the speaker’s intentions.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Philosophy

Grantor

The Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York

Year dc:date.available

2018

Author dc:creator

• Rappaport, Jesse

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Stephen Neale

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• David Rosenthal
• David Papineau
• Gary Ostertag

• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• unarticulated constituents
• pragmatics
• communication
• the meaning-intention problem
• teleosemantics
• Relevance theory

Repository record dc:identifier

https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2885

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:academicworks.cuny.edu:gc_etds-3966