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    It is difficult to maintain that all natural language pre... — Carmelics
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    Home/Philosophy of Language
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    It is difficult to maintain that all natural language predicates have a fixed degree.

    Philosophy of Language
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Strategies such as paraphrasing "John is eating" as "John is eating something" can resist some cases of apparent multigrade predicates.
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    • 2.No systematic and convincing strategy has been found that handles all cases of apparent multigrade predicates in natural language.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Generative grammar (Chomsky) posits that surface-level multigrade predicates reduce to fixed-arity structures at logical form via argument-position saturation.
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    • 2.If logical form systematically assigns hidden arguments (e.g., Davidson's event semantics assigns a fixed event variable to all action predicates), apparent arity variability is a syntactic illusion.
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    • 3.A demonstration that no systematic strategy exists in surface grammar does not preclude a systematic strategy operating at a deeper level of linguistic representation.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Frege's context principle holds that the meaning of a predicate is determined by its role in complete sentences, not by isolated inspection of argument slots.
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    • 2.Under a Fregean analysis, 'eats' in 'John eats' and 'John eats cake' expresses the same concept with unsaturated positions fixed by sentential context, not variable arity.
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    • 3.If apparent arity differences reflect contextual saturation of a single fixed-degree concept rather than genuine multigrade predicates, the claim that natural language resists fixed-degree analysis is undermined.
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    Philosophy of Language

    Related

    A demonstration that no systematic strategy exists in surface grammar does not p...Frege's context principle holds that the meaning of a predicate is determined by...Generative grammar (Chomsky) posits that surface-level multigrade predicates red...If apparent arity differences reflect contextual saturation of a single fixed-de...
    +4 moreShow less
    If logical form systematically assigns hidden arguments (e.g., Davidson's event ...No systematic and convincing strategy has been found that handles all cases of a...Strategies such as paraphrasing "John is eating" as "John is eating something" c...Under a Fregean analysis, 'eats' in 'John eats' and 'John eats cake' expresses t...

    Similar

    Many natural language predicates are multigrade (variably polyadic), t...80%Properties and relations expressed by natural language predicates may ...79%Natural language predicates appear to be multigrade.78%Verbs can be treated as constants that purport to predicate, aligning ...77%

    Source

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    In natural language, however, many predicates appear to be multigrade or variably polyadic; i.e., they can be used with different numbers of arguments, as they can be true of various numbers of things. For example, we say “John is lifting a table”, with “lifting” used as dyadic, as well as “John and Mary are lifting a table”, with “lifting” used as triadic. Moreover, there is a kind of inference, called “argument deletion”, which also suggests that many predicates that prima facie could be assig
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit