It is sometimes argued that the study of grammar is irrelevant or unimportant in the business of comparative philosophy, or that it ought to be avoided in favor of methods that presuppose a strongly pragmatic point of view. In this regard, some philosophers have expressed skepticism about whether facts about grammar have anything to offer in the adjudication of competing theories of interpretation or translation. This essay argues that a strongly pragmatic orientation in comparative philosophy invariably overlooks an important role (...) that the study of grammar can play in shedding light on the nature of intention and communicative practice, and that an essential part of the methodology of comparative philosophy should involve a grammatical approach to interpretation and translation. These points are supported by a semantical analysis of passages from Confucius’ Analects that clarifies the relationship between illocutionary force and grammatical mood. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate the representation of negated sentences in Minimal Recursion Semantics (Copestake, Flickinger, Pollard, & Sag, 2005). We begin with its treatment in the English Resource Grammar (Flickinger, 2000, 2011), a broad-coverage implemented HPSG (Pollard & Sag, 1994), and argue that it is largely a suitable representation for English, despite possible objections. We then explore whether it is suitable for typologically different languages: namely, those that express sentential negation via inflection on the verb, particularly Turkish and Inuktitut. (...) We find that the interaction between negation and intersective modifiers requires a change to the way in which (at least) one of them contributes to semantic composition, and we argue for adapting the analysis of intersective modifiers. (shrink)