Propositionalism in Linguistic Semantics

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Thomas E. Zimmermann
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2017 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 370858788

This project investigates the grounds for a fundamental yet rarely addressed schism in the semantic analysis of natural language. This schism regards the question of what kinds of expressions may denote information content: while propositionalist approaches link linguistic content exclusively to truth-evaluable, clausal meaning, more liberal intensionalist approaches assume that information content need not be truth-evaluable and may in principle be connected with all types of expressions. The project aims to critically examine the propositionalist hypothesis that meaning composition can be accounted for entirely in terms of reference and propositional content. The project will bring together expertise from linguistic semantics, formal logic, and philosophy of language, focussing on the prospects of propositionalism in theoretical linguistics. We expect that, depending on its exact formulation, the propositionalist hypothesis will turn out to be either trivial for formal reasons or inadequate on empirical grounds. In anticipation of this result, the project will also explore alternatives to propositionalism and their explanatory resources beyond linguistic content.

• DFG Programme: Reinhart Koselleck Projects