No name: The Allosemy View

SAAB, ANDRÉS

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Issues in Contemporary Semantics and Ontology III: Proper Names: Current Positions in Philosophy of Language and Linguistics; 2016

Sociedad Argentina de Análisis Filosófico

According to a prevailing view in philosophy of language proper names like Perón have the job of contributing an individual to the proposition in which they occur, in a way such that a sentence like Perón died in 1974 expresses a singular proposition. Call this view referentialism, where the notion of reference implicated in the term at hand is left in a (consciously) vague way. Recent work has challenged the prevailing view on the basis of putative linguistic evidence by adducing that proper names are predicates of a certain type, namely, metalinguistic predicates. On this account, the proper name Perón denotes a predicate more or less paraphrasable as (simplifying again) ?being called Perón?. Thus, for being used as arguments, proper names require additional linguistic material surrounding them. According to predicativism, such additional material comes in the form of a phonologically null determiner. (1)[DP DET [NP Perón]] (DET = /ø/) Arguments for the syntactic and semantic presence of this null D come from attested uses of proper names in predicate position, as in(2)a. There are two Peters in the party. b. The Peter I know told me?Uniformity considerations connecting possible syntactic and semantic analyses for (1) and (2) then lead to the conclusion that predicativism is superior in nontrivial ways to referentialism. A quick glance to a flurry of recent works on the syntax and semantics of proper names both in linguistics and in philosophy of language has been centered on the validity of the uniformity argument. The referentialist, so the predicativist?s argument goes, is condemned to posit lexical-semantic ambiguity. In turn, Leckie (2012) and Jeshion (2015) have challenged the uniformity argument on the basis of different sorts of argumentative strategies, some of which I will follow in this talk. Concretely, I would like to add some linguistic considerations against the validity of the uniformity assumption. The point I will make is that polysemy (in a way to be made precise) is expected for any lexical and functional item in our (mental) dictionary. The referentialist would run into problems only if she were forced to posit homonymy (of the bank type), as it seems clear that there is some sort of non-homophonic identity connection between Juan came in and There is a Juan in the party, when it comes to the lexical nature of the name Juan. But the referentialist would be absolved even if forced to assume ambiguity in the form of (some sort of) polisemy. I will assume that certain aspects of what can be called ?polysemy? in a broad sense boil down to the phenomenon of contextually determined allosemy. This is the phenomenon by virtue of which a given morpheme receives different interpretations depending on the local syntactic context in which it occurs. The Allosemy View claims that identity of functional or lexical morphemes must not be confused with their (different) potential meanings. To take an example from Marantz (2013) the fact that the verb to house is in no relevant way related to the meaning of the noun house does not lead us to posit homonymy. Allosemy dictates the different meanings (i.e., semantic realizations) of the shared part (i.e., the root house) on the basis of the particular syntactic contexts in which this element occurs. The a-categorial root house is then predicted to provide different readings whenever it occurs in a ?verbal? or ?nominal? environment. On this account, there is nothing like a verb or a noun, but complex phrasal structures that determine formal and semantics aspects of what could be called a verb or a noun. The implications of this view for the topic of this talk should be obvious: There are no names, as there are no nouns or verbs. Before syntax, what we have is just a root, say, √PERÓN. Depending on the properties of the nominal or verbal syntax in which this root occurs different (sometimes predictable) meanings arise. We then predict different meanings in particular nominal and verbal environments because of the presence or absence of designated functional structure: (3)a. Juan icardeó. (from the verb icardear = act like Icardi).b. Icardi will play in Milán. c. There are two Icardis on tv, Ivana and Mauro. Therefore, there is nothing special when it comes to possible analyses for proper names as they occur in (1)-(3) and, what is more, no (meta)semantic considerations should follow from this sort of linguistic facts (see Predelli 2015 for related conclusions from a different point of view).