Use and Mention

In this class, we shall always use words, never mention them, and so

Pantanjali has four syllables

is false.

There are four ways of producing a name for an expression:

1. Using quotes. I'll always use single quotes. Not everyone does.
2. Using display.
3. Introducing a name.
4. Linguists often use italics instead of quotes. Philosophers rarely do.

Examples (all true):

Patanjali

has four syllables.

'Patanjali' is the name of an Indian linguist, and it contains no quotation marks.

' 'Patanjali' ' is the name of the name of an Indian linguist, and it is a quote name.

Here is another way of saying the same thing:

'Patanjali'

is the name of the name of an Indian linguist, and it is a quote name.

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Object language vs Metalanguage

In linguistics, we use one language (the metalanguage) to talk about (that is, to mention) another, the object language.

The distinction is completely pragmatic, and is just set up for our convenience on an occasion.

For example, in

'La neige est blanche' is true in French if and only if snow is white

French is the object language, and English the metalanguage.

For obvious reasons, in this course, English will almost always be the metalanguage. It will also usually be the object language. Thus:

'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white.

We could name the sentence 'Snow is white':

1.  Snow is white.

The sentence is now sentence 1. We can therefore express what I did just above as follows:

Sentence 1 is true if and only if snow is white.

That can cause problems if we use the same language as object language and metalanguage:

2.  Sentence 2 is false.

Consider that, according to what we've been saying, the following sentence is true:

Sentence 2 is true if and only if sentence 2 is false.

We will just ignore that problem.

All of the sentences about truth of sentences in English above have, it seems, the following form:

'p' is true if and only if p.

However, if we substitute the sentence 'snow is white' for p in that form, we get

'p' is true if and only if snow is white. *

We need a way around that. The standard device, invented by Quine, known as Quine corners is to have a special kind of quote that does not quote a designated list of letters, they stay variable inside them. The following does what we want:

%$\ulcorner$%p%$\urcorner$% is true if and only if p.

Exercise: Think about how to write the recursion I gave earlier correctly.

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Phonology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics

Linguistics is usually divided up into the above four parts.

Phonology studies the sounds of a language, what sounds and sequences of sounds are "legal," how they change over time, the relationship between pronunciations in different dialects, ... .

Syntax studies grammaticality. That is, it is the study of which sequences of words are ok in a language, what count as words, what categories they fall into. This is pretty much what is called "grammar" in a context in which one is trying to enforce some rules of formation as opposed to finding what the rules are.

Examples:

Jack hill Jill went up. *

Curious green ideas sleep furiously.

It is a remarkable fact that we have a sense of what a well-formed sentence, description, predicate is quite independently of what they might be used for.

It is a surprising fact that phonology and syntax are separate studies.

Semantics studies how language has communicative force. Usually one would just say that semantics studies meanings, but that prejudges the issue whether the best way to think about how we use language to communicate involves anything like meanings.

That will be the main subject of this course.

One and the same sentence can be used to express many different things.

'I am in room 311' expresses different things when used by different people or at different times.

'He has nice handwriting' when used in a letter of recommendation for a job teaching philosophy, means "I have nothing nice to say about his ability as a philosopher: Run!"

That is an extreme example of a phenomenon that is important all the time in language use. Metaphor may be a related case.

These issues: of pronoun reference and implication are part of pragmatics. The easy definition is that pragmatics studies the context dependence of uses of language.

At any rate, most philosophers of language distinguish the literal meaning of an expression from the speaker meaning (what the speaker uses it to mean). That is usually taken to be a part of pragmatics.

The simplest case of semantics is the semantics of names. 'Patanjali' names Patanjali. As we'll see, even that "simple" case is quite hard, and we'll spend more time on that than any other part of language this semester.

-- ShaughanLavine - 17 Jan 2006