Structured Propositions in a Generative Grammar

Abstract

I take the term from (Cresswell 2002). As shall become clear, this is a 'leading idea' in Montague Semantics (Heim and Kratzer 1998, p. 13), though semanticists depart from this core model of semantic composition in various ways.2 See (Partee 2008c, p. 9). 1(1) Terry believes that Sam flies.(2) Terry believes that Sam flies and Sam's father existed.Yet, the existence of a human being necessitates the existence of her material origins. So the sentences in the complement clauses of ( 1) and ( 2)-'Sam flies' and 'Sam flies and Sam's father existed'-have the same intension. As a result, they make the same contribution to (1) and ( 2), and these attitude ascriptions themselves have the same truth-value at every point of evaluation.A standard diagnosis concludes from these substitutivity failures that the compositional semantic values of sentences must do justice to our underlying theory of the objects of attitudes that they express. I focus on one model due to Moore (1899) and Russell (1903Russell ( /1996: the object of an attitude is a structured entity, a structured proposition, made of objects and properties. The proposition that Sam flies is composed of Sam and the property of flying. The proposition that Sam flies and Sam's father existed contains additional constituents. On a rival model due to (an interpretation of) Frege, a proposition is composed not of individuals and properties but of representations. 3 If propositions are the compositional semantic values of sentences (in context -a qualification I normally suppress), then semantics should describe how the proposition expressed by a sentence depends on the compositional semantic values of its constituents and their arrangement. Standard structured propositionalists see that, in the ideal case, the constituents of a structured proposition correspond to the constituents of a sentence that expresses it. 4 Thus, 'Sam flies' expresses a structured proposition with Sam and the property of flying as constituents. Typical proponents of structured propositions infer-wrongly as I shall argue-that the compositional semantic value of an expression is always the propositional constituent, if any, corresponding to it: that the semantic value of the name 'Sam' is the woman herself and the semantic value of the predicate 'flies' is the property of flying. Almost all recent proponents of structured propositions in the tradition of Russell and Moore-including Nathan Salmon (1986), Scott Soames (1987), and Jeff King (2007)-propose semantic theories along these lines.Such semantic theories depart not only from intensional semantics, but also from functional compositionality, which Heim and Kratzer call Frege's Conjecture.[T]here will be many small and some not-so-small departures from the semantic analyses that Frege actually defended. But his treatment of semantic composition as functional application 3 The most explicit statement is (Frege 1963, p. 1). This interpretation is defended in (Dummett 1981, pp. 152-7) and challenged in (Geach 1976). See (Klement 2002, chapter ...

Does Compositionality Entail Complexity?

“…Structured Propositionalists themselves often deny the closely related principle of Functional Compositionality, according to which the semantic value of a whole sentence is obtained by functional application of the semantic values of parts of that sentence to the semantic values of other parts (Cresswell 2002: 645). See King (2007: 111-20) and Pickel (2019) for discussion.…”

Fregeanism, sententialism, and scope

“…We can fix this issue (if it is one), by modifying the system so that, instead of taking the second coordinate of expressions like "is bright" to be the sense of "is bright", we take it to be that function which takes every sense of an expression which denotes an individual, m, to the result of sense-composing it with the sense of "is bright". (Pickel (2017) develops a version of this strategy in a different context, and also provides interesting discussion of methodological issues surrounding functional compositionality.) This modification raises important questions about whether Fregeans should understand the relevant aspect of the meanings of predicates to be senses or merely related to senses, and if the former, whether senses compose by function application or some other mechanism.…”

Introduction: primitivism versus reductionism about the problem of the unity of the proposition

“…The one he provides is a compositional redundancy theory. He relies on a semantics he has developed in a related piece (Pickel 2017), which assigns structured propositions as semantic values to sentences, without assuming that the constituents of the propositions are the semantic values of the expressions compositionally determining them-the latter rather have the function/argument structure assumed in current semantics. Relying on it, Pickel has the proposition ascribing truth to a proposition being identical to the proposition itself.…”