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Remarks on the Syntax and Semantics of Day Designators
Author(s) -
King Jeffrey C.
Publication year - 2001
Publication title -
noûs
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.574
H-Index - 66
eISSN - 1468-0068
pISSN - 0029-4624
DOI - 10.1111/0029-4624.35.s15.14
Subject(s) - syntax , citation , semantics (computer science) , computer science , programming language , linguistics , artificial intelligence , library science , philosophy
I shall call an expression such as ‘January 24, 2001’ a day designator . The purpose of the present work is to discuss the syntactic and semantic properties of day designators. 1 Because my topic may seem very narrow to some, let me begin by discussing a few of the broader issues that thinking about the proper semantics of day designators brings to the fore. First, if one views semantics, as I do, as being at least in good part about how language attaches to reality, it becomes very important in formulating a semantic theory of an expression to think about the bit of reality that expression is used to talk about and how we interact with it. We shall see that giving careful consideration to how time is measured leads us to a semantic theory of day designators that we would be otherwise unlikely to propose. Thus I view the present work as a sort of case study illustrating the importance of attention to such details, which are much too often neglected, in proper semantic theorizing. Second, some philosophers think that all noun phrases in natural languages are either quantifier phrases or rigid referring expressions. 2 In what follows, I shall argue that day designators are nonrigid; I shall also argue (somewhat more tentatively) that day designators are not quantificational. If I am right, then natural languages contain non-rigid, nonquantificational expressions, contrary to the claim mentioned above. Further, and perhaps more importantly, the present study illustrates how to go about determining whether an expression is non-rigid and non-quantificational; and how delicate the issues are that one must face in making such a determination. Let us begin by discussing the syntax of day designators and some of their syntactic constituents. First, there are the words ‘January’, ‘February’, and so on. Though these expressions are often called “names of months”, there is good reason to hold that they are not names at all. Syntactically, these words behave as count nouns. They combine with determiners such as ‘every’, ‘many’, ‘exactly three’ etc. to form restricted quantifiers: 3