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The Binding Argument and Pragmatic Enrichment, or, Why Philosophers Care Even More Than Weathermen about ‘Raining’
Author(s) -
Sennet Adam
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
philosophy compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.973
H-Index - 25
ISSN - 1747-9991
DOI - 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00103.x
Subject(s) - pragmatics , argument (complex analysis) , interpretation (philosophy) , semantics (computer science) , context (archaeology) , exposition (narrative) , linguistics , computer science , semantic interpretation , epistemology , philosophy , history , programming language , art , biochemistry , chemistry , literature , archaeology
What is the proper way to draw the semantics‐pragmatics distinction, and is what is said by a speaker ever enriched by pragmatics? An influential but controversial answer to the latter question is that the inputs to semantic interpretation contains representations of every contribution from context that is relevant to determining what is said, and that pragmatics never enriches the output of semantic interpretation. The proposal is bolstered by a controversial argument from syntactic binding designed to detect hidden syntactic structure. The following contains an exposition and consideration of the argument.