Abstract
What does syntax teach us about language? As a discipline, syntax studies the rules that govern the well-formedness of the complexes of words, or in general the well-formedness of strings of signs. Regardless of whether one considers the syntax of natural languages as a representation of the configuration of the human brain or as an abstract formal theory, syntax as a discipline proposes a particular model or mechanism, a structure combined with a set of rules, that, applied to a suitable basic set of expressions or items, produces (or should be able to produce) all the sentences and complex expressions that constitute a given language.
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Notes
- 1.
What a language is can be defined in different ways from different perspectives. In this chapter, language will be understood as the set of all the well-formed expressions produced by a set of rules of a certain kind. But a language is also a the set of linguistic practices of rational beings. The latter description is closer to our understanding of how language should be approached, although in this chapter the more structural characterization will prevail.
- 2.
Frege declared that truth was a sui generis concept. His own treatment of the predicate “is a fact” is a partial refutation of his own claim. “Truth is obviously something so primitive and simple that it is not possible to reduce it to anything still simpler. Consequently we have no alternative but to bring out the peculiarity of our predicate by comparing it with others. What, in the first place, distinguishes it from all other predicates is that predicating it is always included in predicating anything whatever” (Frege 1897: 128–129).
- 3.
Strictly speaking, this claim is a bit too strong. It will be argued throughout this book that the distinction between different levels of language (syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic) corresponds to a theoretical decision with methodological virtues. Nevertheless, genuine communicative practices do not consist of pieces. A syntactic feature usually has more far-reaching consequences than have been acknowledged in this paragraph. But in general, singular terms are expressions that can be used to refer and denote; sentences are expressions capable to be used to assert propositions. The conversion of a singular term into a sentence adapts a referential tool so that it becomes a vehicle of assertion.
- 4.
Propositions are not linguistic entities. They are expressed when sentences are uttered in appropriate circumstances. Their ingredients depend on the linguistic meaning of the sentence used and on contextual factors. The binary function P before the sentence is intended to stress the fact, that it is not the sentence which is the focus of attention and that the proposition is richer than what is directly derived from the sentence’s linguistic meaning.
- 5.
Rather than “incomplete” we should have said “in need of completion”. For from a pragmatic point of view, context can supply any missing component, and thus a singular term can be used to express a proposition and make an assertion if the context provides the completing ingredient(s). Nevertheless, the point of the text is to stress the syntactic aspect. See Stainton (1994), Carston (2002) and Camós (2008). See Stainton (1994), Carston (2002) and Camós (2008). Stainton’s (2006) is devoted to show that assertions can be made without the use of complete declarative sentences.
- 6.
“[T]he subject contains the whole content, and the predicate serves only to turn the content into a judgement”.
- 7.
“[T]here cannot be any suggestion here of subject and predicate in the ordinary sense”.
- 8.
And many others, Greimann (2000), for instance.
- 9.
“By saying that what George said is true I have committed myself to precisely what George himself asserted. I have, as it were, converted the designation of the proposition, namely “what George said” unto an expression of the same proposition. This is what the words “is true” are for: they are a device for converting the designation of a proposition into an expression of that proposition” (ibid.).
- 10.
The sign “*” is intended to mark that the sentences which it accompanies are grammatically odd.
- 11.
Inverted commas are mechanisms for mentioning, but mentioning is a complex job. See Recanati (2000: chapters 13 and 14) for details.
- 12.
in one sense of “content”. We will come back to this issue in the next chapter.
- 13.
“What one thinks”, “What she said”, “What is the case” and many others, are ambiguous out of context. They can be used as definite descriptions (“the unique thing that she said”), or they can be used as general terms (“everything that is the case”). In this text, both expressions are generalizations.
- 14.
For a further development of this idea, see Chap. 4, Sect. 4.2.
- 15.
See Williams (1989). On p. 185, he says: “The concepts of being, identity and truth are, therefore, in a sense one concept, because what these three words are used in English to express can be expressed in the language of Logic by the apparatus of quantifier and variable.” In our analysis of the relations between truth and identity we will follow Williams’ s views.
- 16.
The notion of deep structure, as it happens with the notion of logical form, is a theoretical term of a particular theory. By using these expressions, we don’t get committed to the existence of a “level of reality” beneath the linguistic surface. The fact that has been stressed is that the semantic and inferential behaviour of these expressions has to be distinguished from the semantic and inferential behaviour of genuine singular terms such as proper names. The distinction nevertheless is not absolute and thus it does not relate to types. A singular term can be used attributively and a definite description referentially. This is something that Donellan and Evans taught us and that has been developed by Carston and Recanati, among others.
- 17.
Strictly speaking, “Barbara ignored her” is only a part of a sentence. From a syntactic point of view it might be understood as possessing sentential structure but, semantically it is not an independent piece of language because of the anaphoric “her”.
- 18.
See (Haack 2005: 59). She says: ““True” has a large extended family of uses. Polonius’s advice to Laertes, “To thine own self be true… Thou canst not then be false to any man”, reminds us that the root of our word “true”, the old English “treowe”, meant “faithful”. In some uses, “true” retains this older meaning: when you apply for a British passport, your unflattering photograph must be endorsed by some responsible person (…) in these words: “I certify that this is a true likeness of …”; and we speak not only of true likenesses but of true friends, true followers, and true believers” (Haack op. cit.).
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Frápolli, M.J. (2013). Syntax: Playing with Building Blocks. In: The Nature of Truth. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 29. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4464-6_2
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