Proof-theoretic semantics of intensional transitive verbs
Final Report Abstract
Intensional transitive verbs (e.g., ‘seek’, ‘want’) display certain intriguing characteristics which attract the attention of linguists and philosophers alike. Thus, the sentence ’Mary seeks a unicorn’, for instance, appears to be ambiguous, since it can be taken to mean either that Mary is looking for a unicorn, but not for a particular one (unspecific reading of ‘a unicorn’), or, alternatively, that Mary is looking for a particular unicorn (specific reading). Another phenomenon related to these verbs is that they do not seem to allow us to reason, e.g., from ‘Mary seeks Bob Dylan’ and ‘Bob Dylan is Robert Zimmerman’ to ‘Mary seeks Robert Zimmerman’, since there is the worry that it might matter whether Mary knows that Bob Dylan is Robert Zimmerman or not. A further main trait of intensional transitive verbs is that they seem to suspend implications of existence. For instance, we seem not to be entitled to extract from ’Mary seeks a unicorn’ the information that unicorns exist. These three characteristics do not seem to apply to extensional transitive verbs (e.g., ‘find’, ‘get’). In proof-theoretic semantics the formal semantics of natural language is given in terms of (harmonious) rules, (canonical) derivations, and proof-conditions, rather than, like in model-theoretic semantics, by means of domains, models, and truthconditions. The proof-theoretic framework employed for the analysis of intensional transitives in the project has been the subatomic constructive type-theoretical formalism. The focus has been on the tools needed for the analysis of natural language constructions which involve an interaction between intensional and extensional transitive verbs and/or an interaction between intensional transitive verbs proper (i.e., those which take objectual complements) and intensional transitive verbs which take propositional complements (here the focus has been on the doxastic propositional attitude verb ‘believe’). The research led to an outline of a constructive account of belief reports which together with the account of (proper) intensional transitive verbs allows us to analyse the logic and semantics of elementary constructions of the aforementioned kind by means of a proof-theoretic semantics framework.
Publications
- ‘A proof-theoretic semantics for contextual definiteness’. In Moriconi, E. and Tesconi, L. (eds.): Second Pisa Colloquium in Logic, Language and Epistemology, pp. 182-214, Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2014
Bartosz Więckowski, N. Francez
- ‘Constructive belief reports’, pp. 31, Synthese, March 2015, Volume 192, Issue 3, pp 603–633
Bartosz Wieckowski
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0540-0) - ‘Refinements of subatomic natural deduction’, pp. 50, Journal of Logic and Computation, Volume: 26 Issue: 5, pp. 1567-1616, Oct. 2016
Bartosz Wieckowski
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/logcom/exu046)
