Abstract
Contemporary linguistic theory has concerned itself, to a large extent, with the question of which possible grammars are capable of serving as the actual grammars of natural languages. Considerably less attention has been given to the cognate question of which possible meanings are capable of serving as meanings actually expressed by natural languages. The first question deals with the so-called generative power of language, the grammatical structures that can or cannot relate the constituents that comprise a sentence, word, or phrase. The second question deals with the expressive power of language, the semantic contents that can or cannot be conveyed by a sentence, word, or phrase. In this paper, we will concern ourselves with the second of these two questions and, in particular, with two explanatory principles that appear to be helpfuI’in providing it with at least the beginnings of an answer.1
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These two principles were first put forward in a talk I gave at New York University in early 1980. (S. Cushing, “Possible Quantifiers” Unpublished paper presented at New York University, 1980.) They first appeared in prhit in S. Cushing, “Quantifier Meanings: A Study in the Dimensions of Semantic Competence” Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1982. I thank Peter Andreae, Sylvain Bromberger, Kathleen Dahlgren, Susan Rothstein, Lucia Vaina, and Lotfi Zadeh for comments or questions that were helpful in preparing the present paper for publication.
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More generally, we can define meanings with any number of modes of untruth, subject only to the constraint that they be individually bivalent, mutually exclusive, and collectivelyexhaustive. See Cushing (1982) for a sentence of English that appears to require four such modes of untruth.
It must be stressed that this is a particularity of all and not a characteristic of determiners or quantifiers in general Sentence (i), for example, implies (ii) (=6), but is not conditional on it, as (9.4) is on (9.6), as is made clear by a comparison of the appropriate analogs of (9.12) and (9.13). See Cushing (1982) for discussion of these examples: (i) Some Republicans favor big business; (ii) There are Republicans.
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That the relation of subliminal variance might be fruitfully viewed as an instance of the more general notion of stereoptype was first suggested to me by George Miller (personal communication).
I thank Susan Rothstein for suggesting the latter possibility (personal communication).
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© 1987 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Cushing, S. (1987). Two Explanatory Principles in Semantics. In: Vaina, L.M. (eds) Matters of Intelligence. Synthese Library, vol 188. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-3833-5_10
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