Topics in Syntax and Semantics
Linguistic and Philosophical Perspectives
Syntax and semantics are traditional areas of the study of language recognised in
linguistics and philosophy of language. This overlap of research areas seems to justify
publication of a volume containing both linguistic and philosophical papers on selected
issues pertaining to syntax and semantics. While linguistics and philosophy of language
remain distinct disciplines in a number of ways, this collection of papers attempts to
demonstrate that exchange of ideas by the representatives of the two fields is not only
possible: it can actually be fruitful.
The major goal of this volume is to bring together the efforts of linguists and
philosophers (representing different schools of thought within respective disciplines)
trying to explore selected topics in syntax and semantics. The most obvious contrast
between linguistics and philosophy of language – the preoccupation with the
morphosyntactic distribution of specific linguistic elements in the former and striving
for precise semantic analyses that abstract from language-particular morphosyntactic
detail in the latter – is still visible throughout the book. Yet, one can observe some
degree of openness to insights from philosophical investigation on the part of linguists
and from linguistic research on the part of philosophers. This openness involves, among
other things, ingesting the results of investigation in the other field, employment of
terminology or even ‘borrowing’ some methods of research.
Introduction 7
Janusz Badio: Some experimental techniques in the study of horizontal and
vertical aspects of event and narrative construal 11
Giulia Felappi: Propositional attitude predicates and ‘that’-clauses 31
Dariusz Głuch: Epistemic must in Japanese – the case of modals hazu and ni
chigainai 61
Andrei Moldovan: Referentially used descriptions in truth-conditional semantics
73
Wiktor Pskit: Linguistic and philosophical approaches to NPN structures 93
Marcin Wągiel: Pairs of things and the meaning of the plural 111
Jan Wiślicki: Deriving quotation: some Minimalist problems 129
Index 155
156 pages Paperback