Tardis & Tame: an Essay on Natural Language Meaning and Metaphysics

Abstract

This paper theoretically approaches the relationship between the instances of time and space as far as natural language conveys their manifestation, focusing on meaning, majorly represented by the subdiscipline of Semantics, along with some insights on Syntax and Pragmatics. The outset-designed ontology is mainly composed by categories of TAME (tense, aspect, mood and evidentiality/eventology) instantiated by linguistic phenomena that yelds anchoring, displacement and aboutness properties. To achieve this wide range of linguistic manifestations the scope takes over the verbal semantics of Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BrP), pursuing to manage the lexical nature of entries in this language and its metaphysical counterpart in meaning. This sort of approach intends to illustrate the proper balance for the formal device of a semantic component regarding these language parameters on TAME and their principles correlation on human language by means of this paper intends to coin as TARDIS. This paper presents three sections such as: a) theoretical, introducing the properties of each category of TAME, throughout history of Linguistics and Semantics; b) methodological, characterizing the lexical/metaphysical dualism for Formal Semantic approaches and their correlation to time and space and some other non-logical privileged concepts entertained by semantic knowledge; c) epistemological and analytical, considering BrP as parameters for TARDIS’ properties conveyed by natural language meaning throughout different categories of TAME and its correlation to some principles which seem to regard human cognition, focusing mainly on modality.