The semantics of existence
Linguistics and Philosophy 36 (1):31-63 (2013)
Abstract
The notion of existence is a very puzzling one philosophically. Often philosophers have appealed to linguistic properties of sentences stating existence. However, the appeal to linguistic intuitions has generally not been systematic and without serious regard of relevant issues in linguistic semantics. This paper has two aims. On the one hand, it will look at statements of existence from a systematic linguistic point of view, in order to try to clarify what the actual semantics of such statements in fact is. On the other hand, it will explore what sort of ontology such statements reflect. The first aim is one of linguistic semantics; the second aim is one of descriptive metaphysics. Philosophically, existence statements appear to reflect the distinction between endurance and perdurance as well as particular notions of abstract states and of kinds. Linguistically, statements of existence involve a particular way of drawing the distinction between eventive and stative verbs and between individual-level and stage-level predicates as well as a particular approach to the semantics of bare plurals and mass nounsAuthor's Profile
DOI
10.1007/s10988-013-9127-3
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Citations of this work
Existence as a Real Property: The Ontology of Meinongianism.Francesco Berto - 2012 - Dordrecht: Synthèse Library, Springer.
Numbers and Cardinalities: What’s Really Wrong with the Easy Argument for Numbers?Eric Snyder - 2017 - Linguistics and Philosophy 40 (4):373-400.
Quantification with Intentional and with Intensional Verbs.Friederike Moltmann - 2015 - In Alessandro Torza (ed.), Quantifiers, Quantifiers, and Quantifiers. Springer.
References found in this work
Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics.Peter Frederick Strawson - 1959 - London, England: Routledge.
Four Dimensionalism: An Ontology of Persistence and Time.Theodore Sider - 2001 - Oxford University Press.
Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics.Peter Frederick Strawson - 1959 - London, England: Routledge.