Ebook: Tense, Attitudes, and Scope
Author: Toshiyuki Ogihara (auth.)
- Tags: Semantics, Philosophy of Language, Syntax, Theoretical Languages
- Series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy 58
- Year: 1996
- Publisher: Springer Netherlands
- Edition: 1
- Language: English
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Tense, Attitudes, and Scope is a model-theoretic inquiry into the semantics of tense in natural language. The book presents the view that the semantic contribution of tense is made in relation to structurally higher expressions (the `relative tense theory') and argues against the view that tenses are all indexicals. This idea is formally encoded as a de se analysis of attitudes, originally proposed by Lewis, coupled with a sequence-of-tense rule posited for English. An auxiliary proposal is made to account for some exceptional cases (e.g. so-called double-access sentences), which invokes de re attitudes about temporal entities (states or intervals). Since the proposed account assumes that the interpretation of tense is structure-dependent, it also correctly predicts scope interactions between tenses and NPs.
Tense, Attitudes, and Scope is intended for scholars and graduate students in formal semantics, syntax-semantics interface, philosophy of language and Japanese linguistics.