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Unarticulated Constituents

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In a recent paper (Linguistics and Philosophy 23, 4, June 2000), Jason Stanley argues that there are no `unarticulated constituents', contrary to what advocates of Truth-conditional pragmatics (TCP) have claimed. All truth-conditional effects of context can be traced to logical form, he says. In this paper I maintain that there are unarticulated constituents, and I defend TCP. Stanley's argument exploits the fact that the alleged unarticulated constituents can be `bound', that is, they can be made to vary with the values introduced by operators in the sentence. I show that Stanley's argument rests on a fallacy, and I provide alternative analyses of the data.

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Recanati, F. Unarticulated Constituents. Linguistics and Philosophy 25, 299–345 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1015267930510

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