No Name: The Allosemy View

Abstract

According to certain versions of predicativism, names denote metalinguistic predicates of a certain type, e.g. the name Perón as it occurs in the sentence Perón died in 1974 denotes a predicate more or less paraphrasable as “being called Perón” (Burge 1973, Matushansky 2008 and Fara 2011, among others). The metalinguistic theory of names is claimed to be superior in nontrivial ways to direct reference theories, according to which names contribute an individual without the mediation of descriptions (Kripke 1980). The alleged triumph of predicativism is that by assuming the “being called N” property as basic, both referential and non‐referential uses of proper names can be given a uniform semantic analysis. By contrast, the referentialist needs to resort to homonymy or semantic ambiguity. In addition, there are some systematic connections between referential and predicative uses of names that at first glance also seem to favor predicativism. The goal of this paper is to present an alternative syntax, semantics and pragmatics of proper names. We assume that grammatical categories and the associated meanings that they are supposed to encode are not grammatical primitives, but epiphenomena that result from the particular way in which syntax combines functional material and lexical Roots. Before syntax, lexical Roots have no detectable meanings. On this account, there are no names before syntax, as there are no nouns, verbs or adjectives. Names are thus seen as the result of a particular syntactic configuration whose semantic realization is that of contributing an individual. Metalinguistic uses of names, and other derived uses, are involved in a different syntactic scheme, one that makes a name Root a predicate of a certain type. Besides their different syntactic basis, we argue that metalinguistic inferences in both referential and predicative uses of names have a pragmatic source. According to the theory we propose, then, the so‐called Being Called Condition is neither a syntactic nor a semantic primitive. Under this conception of proper names the uniformity argument does not hold and the adduced linguistic evidence cannot lead to any (meta‐)semantic consideration.

On the Literal Meaning of Proper Names

“…However, there are good reasons to believe, pace predicativism, that (b) and (c) do not have either the same syntax or the same semantics. regarding the former, as Saab and lo Guercio (2018) show, referential and predicative occurrences of proper names differ crucially in their possibility of being pluralized: d. The obamas left the party very soon e. #obamas left the party very soon This strongly suggests that only (c) possesses a number projection (see Saab and lo Guercio for detailed discussion). In other words, the two constructions differ in their syntax.…”

“…6 This is not the only way of characterizing the view though: indexicalists hold that proper names work like variables for individuals (see recanati 1993,Pelczar & rainsbury 1998, Cumming 1998and Schoubye 2016, although on an indexicalist account the point above remains the same. It is important to note, however, that it can be argued that referentiality is not incompatible with syntactic complexity -seeSaab and lo Guercio (2018) andPredelli (2015).…”

A relação entre raízes, gênero, classe e significado

“…Além disso, diferentemente do que alegam Lazzarini-Cyrino, Armelin & Minussi (2015), a nossa proposta para a interpretação de gênero -a qual assume condições de licenciamento na Enciclopédia -pode dar conta desses casos como (26b) e (27b). Na esteira de Saab (2016), nós vamos assumir que, adicionalmente a um traço de gênero, o nominalizador pode carregar um traço [+humano], e que a presença desse traço faz com que o nome formado naquela estrutura seja interpretado referencialmente 14 , como ilustrado em (30).…”

A short note on honorifics and personal articles in Spanish and Catalan and its consequences for the theory of proper names

“…At any rate, this is a lexical difference, which does not affect the syntactic distribution of these items, which, I assume, is like Bernstein et al propose. 5 Second, following Saab and Lo Guercio (2020), I contend that referential uses of proper names (e.g., bare proper names in contexts like Anne arrived late) do not project a Number Phrase (NumP). In this respect, bare referential uses contrast with predicative uses of proper names (i.e., The Anne I know arrived late), which do project NumP.…”