Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (6):553-581 (2009)
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Abstract |
Category mistakes are sentences such as ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ or ‘The theory of relativity is eating breakfast’. Such sentences are highly anomalous, and this has led a large number of linguists and philosophers to conclude that they are meaningless (call this ‘the meaninglessness view’). In this paper I argue that the meaninglessness view is incorrect and category mistakes are meaningful. I provide four arguments against the meaninglessness view: in Sect. 2, an argument concerning compositionality with respect to category mistakes; in Sect. 3 an argument concerning synonymy facts of category mistakes; in Sect. 4 concerning embeddings of category mistakes in propositional attitude ascriptions; and in Sect. 5 concerning the uses of category mistakes in metaphors. Having presented these arguments, in Sect. 6 I briefly discuss some of the positive motivations for accepting the meaninglessness view and argue that they are unconvincing. I conclude that the meaninglessness view ought to be rejected.
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Keywords | Category mistakes Selectional restrictions Selectional violations Compositionality Semantics Foundations of semantics Montague Grammar Type theoretic semantics Colorless green ideas sleep furiously Meaning Meaningfulness Meaninglessness Nonsense |
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Reprint years | 2010 |
DOI | 10.1007/s10988-010-9067-0 |
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Compositionality, Computability, and Complexity.Peter Pagin - 2021 - Review of Symbolic Logic 14 (3):551-591.
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