Table Of ContentADVERBIAL MODIFICATION
STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS AND PHILOSOPHY
formerly Synthese Language Library
Managing Editors:
ROBIN COOPER, University of Wisconsin
ELlSABET ENGDAHL, University of Wisconsin
RICHARD GRANDY, Rice University
Editorial Board:
EMMON BACH, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
JON BARWISE, CSL!, Stanford
JOHAN VAN BENTHEM, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
DAVID DOWTY, Ohio State University, Columbus
GERALD GAZDAR, University of Sussex, Brighton
EWAN KLEIN, University of Edinburgh
BILL LADU SA W, University of California 'at 'Santa Cruz
SCOTT SOAMES, Princeton University
HENRY THOMPSON, University of Edinburgh
VOLUME 28
M. J. CRESSWELL
Department of Philosophy
Victoria University of Wellington
ADVERBIAL
MODIFICATION
Interval Semantics and Its Rivals
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER ACADEMICPUBUSHERSGROUP
DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LANCASTER /TOKYO
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Cresswell, M. J.
Adverbial modification.
(Studies in linguistics and philosophy; v. 28)
Bibliography: p.
Includes indexes.
1. Grammer, Comparative and general-Adverb. 2. Semantics
(Philosophy) I. Title. II. Series.
P284.C74 1985 415 85-24368
ISBN-13: 978-90-277-2060-3 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-5414-4
001: 10.1 007/978-94-009-5414-4
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,
P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.
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All Rights Reserved
© 1985 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1985.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ORIGINAL PUBLICATION DETAILS vi
PREFACE vii
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I / Adverbs and Events 13
CHAPTER II / Adverbs of Space and Time 41
CHAPTER III / Interval Semantics and Logical Words 67
APPENDIX TO CHAPTER III (1985) 85
CHAPTER IV / Prepositions and Points of View 97
CHAPTER V / Interval Semantics for Some Event Expressions 143
CHAPTER VI/Adverbs of Causation 173
CHAPTER VII / Adverbial Modification in Situation Semantics 193
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL INDEX 221
GENERAL INDEX 226
ORIGINAL PUBLICATION DETAILS
Chapter I: in Synthese 28 (1974) pp. 455-481.
Chapter II: in Formal Semantics and Pragmatics for Natural Language
(ed. F. Guenthner and S. J. Schmidt), Reidel, Dordrecht,
1978,pp.171-199.
Chapter III: in On the Logical Analysis of Tense and Aspect (ed. Ch.
Rohrer) Gunter Narr, Tiibingen, 1977, pp. 7-29. (Appendix
specially written for this volume.)
Chapter IV: in Linguistics and Philosophy 2 (1978), pp. 1-41.
Chapter V: in Semantics from Different Points of View (ed. R. Bauerle,
U. Egli and A. von Stechow), Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1979,
pp.90-116.
Chapter VI: in Words, Worlds and Contexts (ed. H-J. Eikmeyer and H.
Rieser), W. de Gruyter, Berlin, 1981, pp. 21-37.
Chapter VII: specially written for this volume.
PREFACE
Adverbial modification is probably one of the least understood areas of
linguistics. The essays in this volume all address the problem of how to
give an analysis of adverbial modifiers within truth-conditional semantics.
Chapters I-VI provide analyses of particular modifiers within a possible
worlds framework, and were written between 1974 and 1981. Original
publication details of these chapters may be found on p. vi. Of these, all
but Chapter I make essential use of the idea that the time reference involved
in tensed sentences should be a time interval rather than a single instant.
The final chapter (Chapter VII) was written especially for this volume and
investigates the question of how the 'situation semantics' recently devised
by Jon Barwise and John Perry, as a rival to possible-worlds semantics,
might deal with adverbs. In addition I have included an appendix to Chapter
III and an introduction which links all the chapters together.
I would like to thank the following for permission to reprint the articles
which form Chapters III, V and VI: Verlag Gunter Narr, Tilbingen (Chapter
III); Springer-Verlag, Berlin and Heidelberg (Chapter V) and W. de Gruyter,
Berlin (Chapter VI). I would also like to thank the German Science Founda
tion, whose funding supported projects or conferences in which I had the
opportunity to participate. Much of what is in this book was the result of
the contacts I made on those occasions, particularly at the University of
Stuttgart and the University of Konstanz. More specific acknowledgments
will be found in the notes to particular chapters. I can only hope that pre
senting this material in one place will encourage further work on these
difficult topics.
Wellington, New Zealand
March 1985
vii
INTRODUCTION
I once described as the 'most certain principle' of semantics the fact that
if two sentences a: and {3 are such that a: is true and {3 is false then a: and {3
do not mean the same [10, p. 69] . It is perhaps more a slogan than a prin
ciple, and, like all slogans, requires explanation and qualification. Neverthe
less, it still does seem to me the most certain thing I know about meaning,
and any adequate semantic theory must, in my view, give content to this
principle and respect it.
One qualification is the fact that most, if not all, sentences of ordinary
language do not have truth values in isolation. To know whether
(1) Last summer was windy
is true or false we must know at least the time and place the sentence refers
to, and to know whether
(2) France is hexagonal
is true we must know what are the acceptable standards of precision required
for hexagonality in the particular context. So a theory of meaning must at
least provide for a sentence to have a truth value relative to a context of use,
whatever that may turn out to be.
Another qualification that many authors would introduce is that truth
and falsity only apply to indicative sentences (see for instance [15, p. 252f]).
They would say that it makes no sense to ask whether
(3) Bring me some hokey pokey ice cream
or
(4) Did you ever meet Dean Goffin?
can be true or false. My own view about (3) or (4), as expressed in [6, pp.
228-238] or [8, pp. 21-25], is that such sentences do have truth values,
and that the reason that they are often thought not to, is that people think
of truth and falsity as a property, not of a sentence relative to a context,
but as a property of utterances being used as assertions which purport to be
giving information. Those who disagree with me on this will have to see
2 INTRODUCTION
the articles in this book as applying only to indicative sentences, with adapta
tions to be undertaken later for the other moods.
The most certain principle is not the only seman tical principle. Equally
important is what in [6, p. 19] I called Frege's Principle, to the effect that
the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meanings of its
simpler parts.1 This principle, in conjunction with the most certain principle,
imposes quite substantial constraints on a semantical theory. Look first
at an illustration from propositional modal logic. The classical propositional
calculus may be regarded as the minimal seman tical theory to respect the
most certain principle. For in PC the meanings of sentences may simply
be identified with truth values, and the operators which make more complex
sentences out of simpler ones have as their meanings functions from truth
values to truth values - in other words, they are all truth functional. Now
if we add a symbol 0 to mean necessarily, we can see that the combination
of the most certain principle and Frege's principle shows that meanings
cannot be identified with truth values - for the following reason:
Let p be a proposition which is true but only contingently so, say that
Waikanae is a district community. And let q be a proposition which is true
by necessity, say that KM has the finite model property. Then, if the mean
ings of p and q were just their truth values, by Frege's principle the meanings
of Dp and Dq would be identical. But Dp is false and Dq is true and so, by
the most certain principle, the meanings of Dp and oq are not identical,
which means that the meanings of p and q cannot be truth values.
This argument tells us what the meanings of p and q are not, but it does
not tell us what the meanings of p and q are. To answer that question we
have to proceed in a piecemeal way. We ask questions like: what should
the meaning of p and q be to get the truth conditions of Dp and Dq right?
And we then ask this same question of other words as well. In the case of 0
the answer is that we need to know the truth value of p and q not only in
the actual world but in every other possible world. We can then say that
Dp is false because, although Waikanae is a district community in the actual
world, it could easily have been the case either that its popUlation was big
enough for it to be declared a borough, or so small that it was not incor
porated at all. Notice that in order to know that this is possible we do not
need to know what is actually the case. One plausible view of semantic
competence is the view that knowing the meaning of a sentence just is
knowing the conditions under which it is true. And one way of giving content
to this view is to claim that the meaning of a sentence in a context is just
a set of possible worlds. It should be clear that one could know that a
INTRODUCTION 3
sentence would be true in this or that possible world without knowing
whether that world is the actual one. So, knowing meanings does not imply
knowing truth values.
The operator 0 represents the adverb necessarily. This adverb is a senten
tial modifier, which makes a more complex sentence out of a simpler one.
The argument just presented can be restated by saying that, in order to
get an adequate semantics for necessarily which satisfies both the most
certain principle and Frege's principle, the meaning of a sentence must be
at least a set of possible worlds. The argument is not completely watertight
because of course necessarily might not be a genuine sentential operator,
it might be a predicate of sentences, and there might be hidden quotation
marks round the p. Arguments of the kind just outlined are always relative
to having isolated the correct 'logical form' of the expressions being studied.
What I try to do in this book is set out what I consider to be the simplest
logical forms for sentences with adverbial modifiers and ask what sorts of
entities their meanings must be in order to determine the correct truth
conditions of the sentences in which they occur.
One of the advantages of possible-worlds semantics is that in making
the meaning of a sentence in context a set of possible worlds, an explanation
is automatically given of such logical relations between sentences as logical
incompatibility and logical entailment. These relations emerge, as I have
argued in [8] and [9] that they should, as relations of meaning or content
and not of form. Two propositions are incompatible if they have no world
in common, and one proposition entails another if it is included in that
other. The reader will not find in this book any 'logic of modifiers' in
the sense of structural principles willch explain logical relations. This is
because I believe that very few, if any, logical relations have a structural
explanation, and none are independent of the meanings of words. The con
text-dependence is important too, because logical relations do not hold
between sentences in isolation, but at best between sentences in context
by virtue of the relations between the propositions they express in those
contexts. I have explained this in some detail in [7] .
Adverbial modification presents a challenge to logically-based semantical
frameworks for the reasons stated on p. 41f, and it is therefore important
to see how it may be accommodated. There are basically two approaches.
One has its origin in a paper by Donald Davidson [12], and construes adver
bial phrases as being predicates of events. Davidson formalizes tills in ordinary
first-order logic and he and his followers (e.g. [21] and [24]) think of
this as one of the attractive features of this way of dealing with adverbs.
