Function and Concatenation

For any sentence of a natural language, we can ask the following questions: what is its meaning; what is its syntactic structure; and how is its meaning related to its syntactic structure? Attending to these questions, as they apply to sentences that provide evidence for Davidsonian event analyses, suggests that we reconsider some traditional views about how the syntax of a natural sentence is related to its meaning. Many theorists have held, at least as an idealization, that every phrase–and in particular, every verb phrase–consists of (i) an expression semantically associated with some function, and (ii) an expression semantically associated with some element in the domain of that function. On this view, which makes it comfortable to speak of both verbs and functions as taking arguments, each phrase is semantically associated with the value of the relevant function given the relevant argument(s); the semantic contribution of natural language syntax is function-application, as in a Fregean Begriffschrift; and the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meanings of ’s constituents, in the way that the sum of two numbers is determined by those numbers and the addition function. I want to urge a different conception of natural language semantics. Some recent work suggests that phrases are concatenations of predicates, where a complex predicate of the form ^ is satisfied by those things that satisfy both and . On this view, which is motivated by certain eventish hypotheses about the logical forms of natural sentences, the semantic contribution of syntactic branching is predicate-conjunction and not function-application. There is a corresponding sense in which sentences of natural language do not manifest their logical forms. But syntactic structure may still determine logical form; although opportunities for confusion abound, especially if ‘logical form’ is understood in terms of notions like ‘good inference’. 1. Background Let’s assume that (1) has the syntactic structure indicated in (1S):