Preconference version of paper for the 17th International Congress of Linguists in Prague, July, 2003.

In a provocative book (Carstairs-McCarthy 1999), Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy argues that the apparently universal distinction in human languages between sentences and noun phrases cannot be assumed to be inevitable for languages with the expressive power of human languages, but needs explaining. His work suggests, but does not explicitly state, that there is also no conceptual necessity for the distinction between basic types e and t, a distinction argued for by Frege and carried into formal semantics through the work of Montague (Montague (...) 1970). Pragmatic distinctions among various kinds of speech acts, including asserting, questioning, commanding, and pointing things out are assumed in Carstairs-McCarthy’s work, as are expressions of functional types; what is questioned is whether a syntacticized sentence-NP distinction is essential. (shrink)