Terence Parsons

(? - 2022)

It is tempting to think that Meinong overlooked the "specific/nonspecific" distinction. For example, 'I am looking for a grey horse' may either mean that there is a specific horse I am looking for (e.g. one I lost), or just that I am grey-horse-seeking. The former reading, and not the latter, requires for its truth that there be a grey horse. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether it is defensible to maintain Meinong's theory here: to take nonspecific reading of any verb concerning a possibly non-existent but incomplete object. This requires essential appeal to the distinction between nuclear and extranuclear properties. Included is a discussion of criticisms of Meinong's own theory, and of the Medieval theory of ampliation, according to which psychological discourse can "ampliate" a term such as 'chimera' so as to stand for one or more things that cannot exist, yet are chimeras. The paper concludes inconclusively.

I begin by sketching a theory about the semantics of verbs in event sentences, and the evidence on which that theory is based. In the second section, I discuss the evidence for extending that theory to state sentences, including copulative sentences with adjectives and nouns; the evidence for this extension of the theory is not very good. In the third section, I discuss new evidence based on considerations of talk about time travel; that evidence is apparently quite good. I conclude with a problem about formulating default knowledge

An introductory text in linguistic semantics, uniquely balancing empirical coverage and formalism with development of intuition and methodology. This introductory textbook in linguistic semantics for undergraduates features a unique balance between empirical coverage and formalism on the one hand and development of intuition and methodology on the other. It will equip students to form intuitions about a set of data, explain how well an analysis of the data accords with their intuitions, and extend the analysis or seek an alternative. No prior knowledge of linguistics is required. After mastering the material, students will be able to tackle some of the most difficult questions in the field even if they have never taken a linguistics course before. After introducing such concepts as truth conditions and compositionality, the book presents a basic symbolic logic with negation, conjunction, and generalized quantifiers, to serve as the basis for translation throughout the book. It then develops a detailed compositional semantics, covering quantification (scope and binding), adverbial modification, relative clauses, event semantics, tense and aspect, as well as pragmatic phenomena, notably deictic pronouns and narrative progression. A Course in Semantics offers a large and diverse set of exercises, interspersed throughout the text; those labeled “Important practice and looking ahead” prepare students for material to come; those labeled “Thinking about ” invite students to think beyond the content of the book.

This extended investigation of the semantics of event (and state) sentences in their various forms is a major contribution to the semantics of natural language, simultaneously encompassing important issues in linguistics, philosophy, and logic. It develops the view that the logical forms of simple English sentences typically contain quantification over events or states and shows how this view can account for a wide variety of semantic phenomena. Focusing on the structure of meaning in English sentences at a &"subatomic&" level&-that is, a level below the one most theories accept as basic or &"atomic&"&-Parsons asserts that the semantics of simple English sentences require logical forms somewhat more complex than is normally assumed in natural language semantics. His articulation of underlying event theory explains a wide variety of apparently diverse semantic characteristics of natural language, and his development of the theory shows the importance of seeing the distinction between events and states. Parsons demonstrates that verbs, also, indicate kinds of actions rather than specific, individual actions. Verb phrases, too, he argues, depend on modifiers to make their function and meaning in a sentence specific. An appendix gives many of the details needed to formalize the theory discussed in the body of the text and provides a series of templates that permit the generation of atomic formulas of English.