The ontology of words: a structural approach

Nefdt, Ryan M.

doi:10.1080/0020174x.2018.1562967

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…It might seem that such conditions rule out certain metaphysical options, for they appear to render words as, effectively, communicative artefacts. It might be, however, that being abstract and creatable are not inconsistent (Irmak, 2019), and a range of options are available for how tokens stand towards types; for example, types might be abstracta that tokens represent (Bromberger, 1989;Nefdt, 2019;Szabó, 1999). My present aim is not to adjudicate on these internecine metaphysical disputes.…”

Section: Clarificationsmentioning

confidence: 94%

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Internalist priorities in a philosophy of words

Collins

2023

Synthese

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Words appear to be denizens of the external world or, at any rate, not wholly mental, unlike our pains. It is the norm for philosophical accounts of words to reflect this appearance by offering various socio-cultural conditions to which an adequate account of wordhood must cleave. The paper argues, to the contrary, that an adequate account of word phenomena need avert to nothing other than individual psychology along with potential external factors that in-themselves do not count as linguistic. My principal leverage will be that, by everyone’s lights, whatever words are, they are syntactically combinable and possess structural properties. But such conditions cannot be externally realised; instead, they are aspects of our internally realised cognitive capacity. It will also be argued, however, that the position is consistent with much of our common lore about words, albeit sans an externalist linguistic ontology.

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Section: Clarificationsmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Katz & Postal, 1991) considers them to be platonic abstracta, much like numbers. Nefdt (2019) considers words to be like numbers too, although on a structuralist conception of mathematics. Others consider words to be artefactual abstracta, much like pieces of music (Irmak, 2019).…”

Section: The Problems For Externalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Internalist priorities in a philosophy of words

Collins

2023

Synthese

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“…Notable non-essentialist alternatives are Szabó (1999) and Nefdt (2019) though it is unclear what the metaphysical status of kinds are on their views.…”

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confidence: 99%

Words, Species, and Kinds

Miller

2021

Metaphysics

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“…9 9 For example, see Chomsky (2000) and Adger (2003) for approaches characterizing words as “feature bundles”; Jackendoff (2002), Barber (2003), and Ludlow (2011) for more on the philosophical underpinnings of generative linguistics; and Nefdt (2019) for a philosophical account of words which aims at “general correspondence with contemporary generative linguistic approaches to the study of language,” and appears sympathetic to bundlism in important respects. …”

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confidence: 99%

A pluralistic theory of wordhood

Gasparri

2020

Mind & Language

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What are words and how should we individuate them? There are two main answers on the philosophical market. For some, words are bundles of structural–functional features defining a unique performance profile. For others, words are noneternal continuants individuated by their causal‐historical ancestry. These conceptions offer competing views of the nature of words, and it seems natural to assume that at most one of them can capture the essence of wordhood. This paper makes a case for pluralism about wordhood: The view that there is a plurality of acceptable conceptions of the nature of words, none of which is uniquely entitled to inform us as to what wordhood consists in.

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The ontology of words: a structural approach

Cited by 15 publications

References 30 publications

Internalist priorities in a philosophy of words

Internalist priorities in a philosophy of words

Words, Species, and Kinds

A pluralistic theory of wordhood

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