Sentences with slifting parentheticals The formal analysis of natural language, Mouton, The Hague, 1973) grammaticalize an intriguing interaction between truth-conditional meaning and speech act function. In such sentences, the assertion strength of the slifted clause is modulated by the parenthetical, which provides evidential support :480–496, 1952; Asher in J Semant 17:31–50, 2000; Rooryck in Glot Int 5:125–133, 2001; Jayez and Rossari in: Corblin, de Swart Handbook of French semantics, CSLI, Stanford, 2004; Davis et al. in Proc Semant Linguist Theory (...) 17:71–88, 2007; Simons in Lingua 117:1034–1056, 2007; Murray in Semant Pragmat 7:1–53, 2014; Maier and Bary in: Brochhagen et al. Proceedings of the 20th Amsterdam colloquium, 2015; AnderBois in Semant Pragmat 9:1–55, 2016; Hunter in Dialogue Discourse 7:1–35, 2016). Starting with the idea that assertability comes in degrees, this paper develops a probabilistic updatemodel that captures the role of parentheticality as a language tool for qualifying commitments. A crucial role here is played by the rule of Jeffrey conditionalization, which factors in the uncertainty of the parenthetical information itself. The model also derives certain effects of parenthetical modification not found in regular embedding constructions, including the fact that slifting parentheticals are limited to creating upward-entailing environments. (shrink)

The term ‘parenthetical’ is applied to an almost unlimited range of linguistic phenomena, which share but one common feature, namely their being used parenthetically. Parenthetic use is mostly described in terms of embedding an expression into some host sentence. Actually, however, it is anything but clearwhat it means for an expression to be used parenthetically, from both a syntactic and a semantic point of view.Given that in most, if not all, cases the alleged host sentence can be considered syntactically and (...) semantically complete in itself, it needs to be asked what kind ofinformation the parenthetical contributes to the overall structure. Another issue to be addressed concerns the nature of the relation between parenthetical and host (explanation, question, etc.) and the question what is it that holds them together.Trying to figure out the basic function of parentheticals, the present paper proposes a semiotic analysis of parenthetically used expressions. This semioticanalysis is not intended to replace linguistic approaches1, but is meant to elaborate on why parentheticals are so hard to capture linguistically. Taking a dynamicconception of signs and sign processes (in the sense of Peirce, Voloshinov and Bahtin) as starting point, parentheticals are argued to render explicit the inherentdialogicity of signs and utterances. This inherent dialogicity is hardly ever taken into consideration in linguistic analyses, which take the two-dimensional linearityof language as granted. (shrink)

The term ‘parenthetical’ is applied to an almost unlimited range of linguistic phenomena, which share but one common feature, namely their being used parenthetically. Parenthetic use is mostly described in terms of embedding an expression into some host sentence. Actually, however, it is anything but clearwhat it means for an expression to be used parenthetically, from both a syntactic and a semantic point of view.Given that in most, if not all, cases the alleged host sentence can be considered syntactically and (...) semantically complete in itself, it needs to be asked what kind ofinformation the parenthetical contributes to the overall structure. Another issue to be addressed concerns the nature of the relation between parenthetical and host (explanation, question, etc.) and the question what is it that holds them together.Trying to figure out the basic function of parentheticals, the present paper proposes a semiotic analysis of parenthetically used expressions. This semioticanalysis is not intended to replace linguistic approaches1, but is meant to elaborate on why parentheticals are so hard to capture linguistically. Taking a dynamicconception of signs and sign processes (in the sense of Peirce, Voloshinov and Bahtin) as starting point, parentheticals are argued to render explicit the inherentdialogicity of signs and utterances. This inherent dialogicity is hardly ever taken into consideration in linguistic analyses, which take the two-dimensional linearityof language as granted. (shrink)

I have proposed that the complementizerthat has a pragmatic property of demonstrativity, analogous to that ascribed by demonstrative analyses of the semantics of the complementizer but not impinging on the syntactic analysis of sentential embedding. My account explains a number of phenomena, including the illocutionary peculiarities of parentheticals, the pragmatics ofthat-omission, and consequently the distributional statistics ofthat-omission and related grammatical features of embeddings reported in the literature. By this means these phenomena are theoretically unified under a single hypothesis.Furthermore, this (...) demonstrativity is a matter of degree. There is a spectrum of distinct pragmatic manifestations of this demonstrativity, ranging from the purely paratactic-like interpretation that ascribes no illocutionary relation between the speaker and the complement, and is highly incompatible withthat-omission, to the purely parenthetical interpretation where illocutionary force attaches to the complement and is highly conducive tothat-omission.A more general moral appears when the minimally revisionist syntactic consequences of my proposal are compared to the radical syntactic consequences of Thompson and Mulac's. Even if we hold that the syntactic structure of a natural language cannot be grasped outside of its general communicative contexts, we need not connect syntax and pragmatics so immediately as Thompson and Mulac seem to think. By resisting the idea that the syntax of parentheticals isipso facto different from the syntax of compositional embeddings, we allow some “slack” between syntax and pragmatics, thereby enabling us to analyze such subtle syntax-pragmatics interactions as negative-raised parentheticals. The methodological moral is to avoid too facile a connection between syntactic and pragmatic analyses. (shrink)

Diane Blakemore; XI*—Performatives and Parentheticals, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 91, Issue 1, 1 June 1991, Pages 197–214, https://doi.org/.

Diane Blakemore; XI*—Performatives and Parentheticals, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 91, Issue 1, 1 June 1991, Pages 197–214, https://doi.org/.

It has frequently been observed that typical utterances of the form “I believe that P” are assertions of the embedded proposition P. Yet that the matrix clause “I believe that” should be semantically idle creates an interesting puzzle: linguistic orthodoxy holds that the utterance is an assertion about one’s doxastic state, not about the content of this state. In response to the puzzle, Tim Henning has recently proposed a new semantic theory, parentheticalism, according to which “S believes that P” expresses (...) P from S’s point of view: the at-issue content in belief ascriptions is the embedded proposition P. The puzzle is then claimed to be resolved as follows: as speaker and doxastic subject are identical in the first-person case, “I believe that P” expresses P from the speaker’s own point of view. In this paper, I argue, first, that parentheticalism is highly doubtful and, second, that even if parentheticalism were true, it would be unable to resolve the transparency puzzle. (shrink)

Arguably the biggest challenge in analyzing English tense is to account for the double access interpretation, which arises when a present tensed verb is embedded under a past attitude—e.g., "John said that Mary is pregnant". Present-under-past does not always result in a felicitous utterance, however—cf. "John believed that Mary is pregnant". While such oddity has been noted, the contrast has never been explained. In fact, English grammars and manuals generally prohibit present-under-past. Work on double access, on the other hand, has (...) either disregarded the oddity (e.g., Abusch 1997: 39) or treated it as a reflex of a particular dialect (e.g., Kratzer 1998: 14). The goal of the paper is to argue—based on a corpus study—that a present-under-past sentence is grammatical, but modulated by two, interacting pragmatic phenomena: cessation and parentheticality. (shrink)

Appositive relative clauses differ from restrictive relative clauses in a number of ways. The fundamental distinction is semantically based: an appositive relative like that in (1a) conveys an independent assertion about the referent of its associated head; the reference of the head is established independently of the appositive relative. In contrast, a restrictive relative like that in (1b) is interpreted as an intersective predicate modifier, restricting the reference of its head.

This essay presents an analysis of the conversational role of disambiguation, with special attention to disambiguating parentheticals such as 'bats, the furry animals, are not easy to find'. The essay proposes an enriched representation of conversational states as pairs of an interpretation function and standard common belief, it represents disambiguations within the ensuing framework, and, on the basis of these conceptual tools, it proposes a systematic picture of the updates achieved by disambiguating parentheticas.

The title of this paper represents a "trick question" of the sort an interlocutor might employ to solicit an answer which, if framed with specific regard to the question's implicatures, cannot fail to confirm that interlocutor's position or further his aims. The best-known query of this form is the cliched "Do you still beat your spouse?" To escape being trapped, the respondent must either (a) avoid answering or (b) point out and refute the implication(s) embedded in the question itself. In (...) practice, both options typically entail risk. Option (a) may violate the procedural form of the "language game" (cf. Wittgenstein, 1963) within which the question occurs, while option (b) may violate the thematic or orientational focus presumed or enacted in that language game. This paper is intended to outline a "trick question" (that of the title) which has over the years been a recurrent challenge slung at adherents of the theories which have brought us together here in Belo Horizonte. If the following text accomplishes my intentions, it will explain the challenge, assess our response(s) to date, and offer suggestions about what (if any) further action it may prudently motivate. (shrink)

Centering Theory (CT) as articulated by Grosz et al. (1995) is a theory intended to model some of the factors that influence local coherence in a discourse. The idea is that at any one time there are a number of entities that are at the center of attention. Each utterance n that makes up a discourse potentially has two sorts of discourse ‘centers’, an ordered set of forward-looking centers, Cf(uttn), that provide potential links to upcoming utterances, and a single backward-looking (...) center, Cb(uttn), that links back to the previous utterance, in the sense that it is identical to one of the members of the set of forward-looking centers of the previous utterance. Roughly, one can think of Cb(uttn) as the current topic of the conversation. The members of the set Cf(uttn) on the other hand are the entities mentioned in the utterance and which are candidates to become the next topic of conversation. The members of Cf(uttn) are ranked in order of their salience. The most highly ranked member of Cf(uttn) is the preferred center, Cp(uttn), and ideally it will become the backward-looking center of the next utterance, Cb(uttn+1). When Cb(uttn) is the most highly ranked member of Cf(uttn), this indicates that it will continue to be the topic of conversation in the next utterance. If this does indeed happen, we have what is known in CT as a CONTINUE transition. When some entity other than Cb(uttn) is the most highly ranked member of Cf(uttn), an upcoming topic shift is signaled. This situation is known in CT as a RETAIN. A topic shift following a RETAIN will be a SMOOTH SHIFT. If the topic shifts to an entity that is neither the preferred center of the current nor of the previous utterance, then the shift will be a ROUGH.. (shrink)

When we discuss normative reasons, oughts, requirements of rationality, hypothetical imperatives (or “anankastic conditionals”), motivating reasons and so on, we often use verbs like “believe” and “want” to capture a relevant subject’s perspective. According to the received view about sentences involving these verbs, what they do is describe the subject’s mental states. Many puzzles concerning normative discourse have to do with the role that mental states consequently appear to play in this discourse. This book uses tools from formal semantics and (...) the philosophy of language to develop an alternative account of sentences involving these verbs. According to this view, which is called parentheticalism (in honour of J. O. Urmson), we very commonly use these verbs in a parenthetical sense. Used with this sense, these verbs themselves express backgrounded side-remarks on the contents they embed, and these latter, embedded contents constitute the at-issue contents of our utterances. This means that instead of speaking about the subject’s mental states, we often use sentences involving “believe” and “want” to speak about the world in a way that, in the conversational background, relates our utterances to her point of view. This idea is made precise, and it is used to solve various puzzles concerning normative discourse. The final result is a new, unified understanding of normative discourse, which gets by without postulating conceptual breaks between objective and subjective normative reasons, or normative reasons and rationality, or indeed between the reasons we ascribe to an agent and the reasons she herself can be expected to cite. Instead of being connected to either subjective mental states or objective facts, all of these normative statuses can be adequately articulated by citing worldly considerations from the subject’s point of view. (shrink)

A speaker's use of a declarative sentence in a context has two effects: it expresses a proposition and represents the speaker as knowing that proposition. This essay is about how to explain the second effect. The standard explanation is act-based. A speaker is represented as knowing because their use of the declarative in a context tokens the act-type of assertion and assertions represent knowledge in what's asserted. I propose a semantic explanation on which declaratives covertly host a "know"-parenthetical. A speaker (...) is thereby represented as knowing the proposition expressed because that is the semantic contribution of the parenthetical. I call this view parentheticalism and defend that it better explains knowledge representation than alternatives. As a consequence of outperforming assertoric explanations, parentheticalism opens the door to eliminating the act-type of assertion from linguistic theorizing. (shrink)

This paper discusses three potential varieties of update: updates to the common ground, structuring updates, and updates that introduce discourse referents. These different types of update are used to model different aspects of natural language phenomena. Not-at-issue information directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary mood of a sentence structures the context. Other updates introduce discourse referents of various types, including propositional discourse referents for at-issue information. Distinguishing these types of update allows a unified treatment of a broad range of (...) phenomena, including the grammatical evidentials found in Cheyenne (Algonquian) as well as English evidential parentheticals, appositives, and mood marking. An update semantics that can formalize all of these varieties of update is given, integrating the different kinds of semantic contributions into a single representation of meaning. (shrink)

The Knowledge Norm or Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA) has received added support recently from data on prompting assertion (Turri 2010) and from a refinement suggesting that assertions ought to express knowledge (Turri 2011). This paper adds another argument from parenthetical positioning, and then argues that KAA’s unified explanation of some of the earliest data (from Moorean conjunctions) adduced in its favor recommends KAA over its rivals.

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, on the basis of a re-examination of the sources and with new arguments, it discusses the meaning of a verse-fragment quoted anonymously by Servius ad Aen. 4.638 (Enn. Ann. Dub. Fr. V Sk. = Inc. 31 blänsdorf, p. 434 courtney), and supports the attribution of this fragment to Ennius’ “Annales”. Second, it demonstrates that this attribution is not undermined by the presence, in the fragment, of a parenthetical phrase that is “in apposition”, (...) a stylistic feature which, though commonly believed to date back to Virgil’s time, may, in fact, be also attested in another Ennian fragment from the “Annales” (Enn. Ann. 22 Sk.). (shrink)

This paper discusses the semantically parenthetical use of clauseembedding verbs such as see, hear, think, believe, discover and know. When embedding verbs are used in this way, the embedded clause carries the main point of the utterance, while the main clause serves some discourse function. Frequently, this function is evidential, with the parenthetical verb carrying information about the source and reliability of the embedded claim, or about the speaker’s emotional orientation to it. Other functions of parenthetical uses of verbs are (...) discussed. (shrink)

The term ‘parenthetical’ is applied to an almost unlimited range of linguistic phenomena, which share but one common feature, namely their being used parenthetically. Parenthetic use is mostly described in terms of embedding an expression into some host sentence. Actually, however, it is anything but clear what it means for an expression to be used parenthetically, from both a syntactic and a semantic point of view.Given that in most, if not all, cases the alleged host sentence can be considered syntactically (...) and semantically complete in itself, it needs to be asked what kind of information the parenthetical contributes to the overall structure. Another issue to be addressed concerns the nature of the relation between parenthetical and host and the question what is it that holds them together.Trying to figure out the basic function of parentheticals, the present paper proposes a semiotic analysis of parenthetically used expressions. This semiotic analysis is not intended to replace linguistic approaches, but is meant to elaborate on why parentheticals are so hard to capture linguistically. Taking a dynamic conception of signs and sign processes as starting point, parentheticals are argued to render explicit the inherent dialogicity of signs and utterances. This inherent dialogicity is hardly ever taken into consideration in linguistic analyses, which take the two-dimensional linearity of language as granted. (shrink)

Arguments have always played a central role within logic and philosophy. But little attention has been paid to arguments as a distinctive kind of discourse, with its own semantics and pragmatics. The goal of this essay is to study the mechanisms by means of which we make arguments in discourse, starting from the semantics of argument connectives such as `therefore'. While some proposals have been made in the literature, they fail to account for the distinctive anaphoric behavior of `therefore', as (...) well as uses of argument connectives in complex arguments, suppositional arguments, arguments with non-declarative conclusions, as well as arguments with parenthetical remarks. A comprehensive account of arguments requires imposing a distinctive tree-like structure on contexts. We show how to extend our account to accommodate modal subordination and and di fferent flavors of `therefore'. (shrink)

Neg-Raising concerns the phenomenon by which certain negated predicates can give rise to a reading where the negation seems to take scope from an embedded clause. The standard analysis in pragma-semantic terms goes back to Bartsch and has been elaborated in Horn, Gajewski, Romoli, and many others. Recently, this standard approach has been challenged by Collins and Postal, who argue, by providing various novel arguments, that Neg-Raising involves syntactic movement of the negation from the embedded clause into the matrix clause. (...) The syntactic structure of ‘I don’t think you’re right’ would then be like: I do[n’t]i think you’re ti right, and the Neg-Raising reading would result from the interpretation of the lower copy of the negation. In this paper I present three novel arguments against this account. First, following up work by Horn, I show that Collins and Postal, and their reply to Horn, predict that every negated predicate that can license so-called Horn-clauses should receive a Neg-Raising reading, contrary to fact. Second, Collins and Postal adopt various instances of phonological deletion of negative operators—a necessary ingredient for their account—but these instances of phonological deletion cannot be independently motivated. Third, it turns out that for certain constructions, Collins and Postal must also allude to the original Bartschian approach. I further demonstrate that the standard, pragma-semantic approach to Neg-Raising actually explains the grammaticality of Horn-clauses and other phenomena, such as the distribution of negative parentheticals, that were presented by Collins and Postal as arguments in favour of the syntactic approach to Neg-Raising, equally well, if not better, than this syntactic alternative. (shrink)

Moorean constructions are famously odd: it is infelicitous to deny that you believe what you claim to be true. But what about claiming that p, only to immediately put into question your evidence in support of p? In this paper, we identify and analyse a class of quasi-Moorean constructions, which we label counterevidentials. Although odd, counterevidentials can be accommodated as felicitous attempts to mitigate one’s claim right after making it. We explore how counterevidentials differ from lexicalised mitigation operators, parentheticals, (...) and anaphoric mitigation devices, and consider some cognate non-assertoric constructions. We conclude by exploring the implications of our analysis for theorising about linguistic responsibility, assertion, and lying. (shrink)

If all dependent expressions were adjacent some variety of immediate constituent analysis would suffice for grammar, but syntactic and semantic mismatches are characteristic of natural language; indeed this is a, or the, central problem in grammar. Logical categorial grammar reduces grammar to logic: an expression is well-formed if and only if an associated sequent is a theorem of a categorial logic. The paradigmatic categorial logic is the Lambek calculus, but being a logic of concatenation the Lambek calculus can only capture (...) discontinuous dependencies when they are peripheral. In this paper we present the displacement calculus, which is a logic of intercalation as well as concatenation and which subsumes the Lambek calculus. On the empirical side, we apply the new calculus to discontinuous idioms, quantification, VP ellipsis, medial extraction, pied-piping, appositive relativisation, parentheticals, gapping, comparative subdeletion, cross-serial dependencies, reflexivization, anaphora, dative alternation, and particle shift. On the technical side, we prove that the calculus enjoys Cut-elimination. (shrink)

Bermúdez's case for rational framing effects, while original, is unconvincing and gives only parenthetical treatment to the problematic assumptions of extensional and semantic equivalence of alternative frames in framing experiments. If the assumptions are false, which they sometimes are, no valid inferences about “framing effects” follow and, then, neither do inferences about human rationality. This commentary recaps the central problem.

Meditation. A man is a compositus ex mente et corpore (VII 82; II 57), a composite being consisting of a mind and a body. [Note: In parenthetical citations of Descartes's text, the first pair of numerals refers to volume and page of the Adam and Tannery edition; the second pair to volume and page of the English translation by Cottingham, Stoothoff, Murdoch, and Kenny.] These two components of a man are themselves different things. Not only are they disparate in nature, (...) having nothing in common; but they are also distinct from one another, in the sense that each can exist without the other. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to say something significant about Stanley Cavell's style. To accomplish this task, we adopt a distant reading approach, quantifying what seems to be an idiosyncratic use of parentheses. After outlining our methodological approach and the choices of texts from Cavell's corpus, we will present the results of our quantitative analysis. Two kinds of results will be presented and interpreted: the result of a comparison between Cavell and other authors (i.e. why Cavell's use of parentheses (...) is exceptional) and the result of a quantitative analysis of Cavell's texts (i.e. how Cavell uses parentheses throughout his books). For both results, we will provide our own interpretation. In the conclusion, we will draw the moral of this parenthetical story, hoping to open future parentheses. (shrink)

Many philosophers are building a solid case in favour of the knowledge account of assertion (KAA). According to KAA, if one asserts that P one represents oneself as knowing that P. KAA has recently received support from linguistic data about prompting challenges, parenthetical positioning and predictions. In this article, I add another argument to this rapidly growing list: an argument from what I will call ‘reinforcing parenthesis’.

Things do not begin to live except in the middle.--Gilles Deleuze, DialoguesA Land of UnlikenessThe English novel The Go-Between begins a tale of memory and loss with two sentences a historian could love: "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." The novel's narrator should know: he is a librarian, someone who, as the memory ghost of his twelve-year-old self will remind him, spends his days cataloguing the relics of the book-past. And many who now live with (...) the past for a living might nod in recognition: the metaphor slips on comfortably, like a well-worn shoe. The past can feel like a place as much as it does a time -- a foreign place, outside the doors of the familiar, beyond the gate and the gatekeepers of the now.Especially beyond the pale is the Middle Ages, definitional whipping boy for generations of citizens of the present who have needed an "all-purpose alternative" against which to define themselves. The difference of medieval doing is embedded already in the names we still give the time: the "Middle Ages" makes parenthetical death of the interval between Classical life and its humanist "rebirth." "Premodern" gives life only in anticipation of the modern, directing the period toward a telos of recognizability in the now that the premodern, as such, will always fail to satisfy.The Middle Ages were invented to be a foreign country. The indigenous peoples are dead, and they didn't even know they were medieval -- they thought they were living in modern times. They thought it was now: "There is no other age than ours," Raymond de l'Aire of Tignac told the inquisitors nosing for heresy in his town around 1320.But this is "now," and there are elements about the "Middle Ages" that feel foreign -- foreign in this modern, postmodern, or maybe even post-postmodern land we still call "now." Everyone who has ever read a medieval book cold or taught one to cold undergraduates has felt this foreignness intimately in his or her suddenly awkward flesh. All those quotations, all that Catholicism, all those arguments and counterarguments; not to mention those old words, weird verb forms, erratic spelling, and all that damn Latin.There's no question that the Middle Ages is an other, perhaps even a foreign place, someplace, as the etymology indicates, beyond our own doors . What are we doing when we go there? What happens to "here" and "there" when we go? The question isn't whether medieval people did things differently than we do now; the question is what we as putative nonmedievals are going to do with the difference. What stories do we tell ourselves about it? What do they do to and for us?When medievalists talk about medieval otherness, it can feel like a slap in the face; it can feel like a come-on; it can of course be both at once. Take, for example, Paul Zumthor's monumental Essai de poétique médiévale. Published in 1972, the Essai set medieval poetry in dialogue with what was then high literary theory. The dialogue made the foreignness of medieval poetry accessible to a mid-1980s graduate student like me; it taught me that medieval texts could be active participants in the theoretical discussions I was learning to have with friends, professors, and texts. Returning to the Essai now with the theory-midwifed births of "New Philology" and "New Medievalism" in the past, I was surprised to find that this text that I thought bridged temporal gaps begins by blowing up more bridges than it builds. "We are cut off from the Middle Ages by a divide that we should not attempt to ignore, but that we should rather see as an impassible abyss," Zumthor announces in his second paragraph. Why, then, even write the book, students I once read this with wanted to know, and it's a good question.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Phaedra's Labyrinth as the Paradigm of Passion: Racine's Aesthetic Formulation of Mimetic Desire Jacques-Jude Lépine Haverford College The actual model of Racine's Phaedra is no more the one that he claims to follow in his preface than one ofthose which his critics have sought in vain to find in the works of his immediate predecessors.1 Indeed, the comparative reading ofRacine's last profane tragedy against his sources shows that Seneca (...) and Euripides only provided a very general framework, one might say a traditional theme, which Racine completely recasts on the level of the plot, structure, characters, poetic esthetics, and theatrical performance. On the other hand, the myth of Phaedra's involuntary passion for her stepson Hippolytus, the hunter who was supposed to be atavistically insensitive to erotic seduction, could very well have been reorganized on the basis of another mythological episode which precedes it, the killing of the Minotaur by Theseus in the Labyrinth. There are many explicit references to this episode throughout Racine's Phaedra. There are even more than a rich but strictly thematic critic has been able to detect (see Racine), underscoring the fundamental point of my essay that the intensely poetic character of the Labyrinth, and particularly its function as a fantastic spatial frame, is not simply of a decorative nature. In Racine's work, as in any other genuine literary masterpiece, there is a unity ofcontent and form. The many references to the Labyrinth are determinant for the very subject ofPhaedra, which is the representation of passion, the only subject of interest for Racine. In fact, I intend to demonstrate that Racine used the unique topography of the Labyrinth as a paradigm of the logic of the relationships between his ' These works are Garnier's "Hippolyte" (1573) and Quinault's "Bellérophon" (1671). 48Jacques-Jude Lépine characters because of its capacity for fully expressing the mimetic origin of passion, a decisive discovery the gradual stages towards which may be traced in all his previous works. The Monster Hunt as a Metaphor of the Dramatic Action In order to demonstrate this point, I will start from the textual data, even though it will be necessary to go beyond a simple inventory of the themes explicitly connected to the Labyrinth. The first of these themes is obviously the one of monstrosity. At some point in the play, all the main characters accuse themselves, or are accused, of being a monster (Barthes 115). The relationship between this moral monstrosity (expressed in ambiguous statements suggesting a physical sign) and the return of Theseus, whose numerous monster hunts Hippolytus recalls in the opening scene,2 is easy to see. As has been already noted, the theme of the monster hunt is present from beginning to end of the play, where the fight between Hippolytus and the sea monster occurs (see Jasenas). But the monsterpar excellence is the Minotaur, whose death at the hands of Theseus Phaedra recalls in a famous speech which serves to reveal her passion to Hippolytus through a series of substitutions in the original cast of characters: Oh, why were you too young top have embarked Within the ship that brought him [Theseus] to our shores? You would have been the monster's killer then, In spite of all the windings of his maze. To find your way in that uncertain dark, My sister would have armed you with the thread. But no! In this design I would have been Ahead of her, my sister! Me, not her, It would have been whom love at first inspired; And I it would have been, Prince, I, whose aid Had taught you all the Labyrinth's crooked ways. A single thread would not have been enough To satisfy your lover's fears for you. I would myself have wished to lead the way, And share the perils you were bound to face. Phaedra, into the Labyrinth, with you Would have descended, and with you returned, To safety, or with you have perished. (647-62) 2 See verses 73-90. References to Margaret Rawlings's translation of Phaedra will be given parenthetically in the text. The verse numbers refer to the French edition... (shrink)

Instead of seeing satisfaction as the necessary and appropriate goal of desire, Dreiser seems to see it only as an inevitable but potentially fatal by-product. Desire, for him, is most powerful when it outstrips its object; indeed, it is the very fact of this excessiveness that fuels Sister Carrie's economy—which is one reason why Carrie is right to think of money as "power itself." The economy runs on desire, which is to say, money, or the impossibility of ever having enough (...) money. Nothing is more characteristic of Carrie than her ability to "indulge" in what Dreiser calls "the most high-flown speculations,"1 rocking in her chair and spending in "her fancy" money she hasn't yet earned. Fancy or imagination is the very agent of excessive desire for Carrie, enabling her to get "beyond, in her desires, twice the purchasing power of her bills" . When Drouet suggests to her that she has dramatic ability, "imagination," as usual, "exaggerated the possibilities for her. It was as if he had put fifty cents in her hand and she had exercised the thoughts of a thousand dollars" .· 1. Thomas Dreiser, Sister Carrie, ed. Donald Pizer , p. 22. All subsequent references to this work will be cited parenthetically in the text.Walter Benn Michaels is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of articles on American literature and literary theory and a book entitled American Epistemologies: Literary Theory and Pragmatism. (shrink)

Speech acts have sometimes been considered as unembeddable, for principled reasons. In this paper, I argue that speech acts can be embedded under certain circumstances. In particular, I consider denegation and conjunction of speech acts, quantification into speech acts, conditionalization of speech acts, the embedding of speech acts by verbs like say and wonder, speechact-modifying adverbials like frankly, clauses commenting on speech acts, like certain uses of because-clauses, parentheticals, and appositive relative clauses. A crucial distinction is made between speech (...) acts and speech act potentials, linguistic objects that can be used to perform speech acts when applied in a specific communicative situation. I develop a semantic theory in which speech act potentials are captured as semantic functions that change a world-time index, reflecting the nature of speech acts as events that happen in the world. As index changers, speech act potentials become nearly regular semantic objects, with a proper semantic type on which other semantic objects can operate on. In this way, speech acts (or rather, speech-act potentials) become part of the recursive structure of language. (shrink)

In this paper, I compare Pierre-Simon Laplace's celebrated formulation of the principle of determinism in his 1814 Essai philosophique sur les probabilités with the formulation of the same principle offered by Roger Joseph Boscovich in his Theoria philosophiae naturalis, published 56 years earlier. This comparison discloses a striking general similarity between the two formulations of determinism as well as certain important differences. Regarding their similarities, both Boscovich's and Laplace's conceptions of determinism involve two mutually interdependent components—ontological and epistemic—and they are (...) both intimately linked with the principles of causality and continuity. Regarding their differences, however, Boscovich's formulation of the principle of determinism turns out not only to be temporally prior to Laplace's but also—being founded on fewer metaphysical principles and more rooted in and elaborated by physical assumptions—to be more precise, complete and comprehensive than Laplace's somewhat parenthetical statement of the doctrine. A detailed analysis of these similarities and differences, so far missing in the literature on the history and philosophy of the concept of determinism, is the main goal of the present paper. (shrink)

Illocutionary force and semantic content are widely held to occupy utterly different categories in at least two ways: Any expression serving as an indicator of illocutionary force must be without semantic content, and no such expression can embed. A refined account of the force/content distinction is offered here that does the explanatory work that the standard distinction does, while, in accounting for the behavior of a range of parenthetical expressions, shows neither nor to be compulsory. The refined account also motivates (...) a development of the "scorekeeping model" of conversation, helps to isolate a distinction between illocutionary force and illocutionary commitment, and reveals one precise respect in which meaning is only explicable in terms of use. (shrink)

Surprisingly little has been written about hedged assertion. Linguists often focus on semantic or syntactic theorizing about, for example, grammatical evidentials or epistemic modals, but pay far less attention to what hedging does at the level of action. By contrast, philosophers have focused extensively on normative issues regarding what epistemic position is required for proper assertion, yet they have almost exclusively considered unqualified declaratives. This essay considers the linguistic and normative issues side-by-side. We aim to bring some order and clarity (...) to thinking about hedging, so as to illuminate aspects of interest to both linguists and philosophers. In particular, we consider three broad questions. 1) The structural question: when one hedges, what is the speaker’s commitment weakened from? 2) The functional question: what is the best way to understand how a hedge weakens? And 3) the taxonomic question: are hedged assertions genuine assertions, another speech act, or what? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Japanese Things and Words:An Answer to Heidegger's QuestionMichael F. MarraIt has been over thirty years since my high school teacher of philosophy, Professor Dino Dezzani, recommended a book from which to begin my study of philosophy: Martin Heidegger's (1889-1976) Unterwegs zur Sprache (On the way to language [1959]). Evidently he was aware of my interest in literature and thought that Heidegger's discussion of words, things, and poetic language (...) would give some sort of direction to my naïve and youthful questions of what literature is about and what I should hope to find in it.The impact that Heidegger's book had on this young student was much greater than my professor could ever have imagined. I would hardly have committed myself to the study of Japan were it not for my reading of "A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer," which appears in On the Way to Language. The dialogue is a fictional reconstruction of an actual meeting that Heidegger had with Tezuka Tomio (1903-1983), a Japanese scholar of German literature who visited the German philosopher in Freiburg at the end of March 1954.1 In the dialogue the Inquirer (Heidegger) formulates a central question that, in my opinion, should be of fundamental interest to anyone seriously concerned with the study of Japan. The question is deceptively simple, at least compared with the difficulty of coming up with the answer-an answer that, as a matter of fact, the reader will not find fully formulated in the dialogue. The question is: "What is the Japanese word for 'language' "? The Japanese visitor (Tezuka in Heidegger's recollection) appears to have been caught off guard, as we can see from Heidegger's parenthetical remark: "after further hesitation." Had Heidegger posed the same question to a Frenchman or an Italian, the answer would have been immediate: "langue" or "lingua." The challenge for Tezuka was definitely higher since he had a variety of words from which to choose. He could have used, for example, the expression gengo, a combination of two Chinese characters indicating "the speech of words." Instead, he used an ancient Japanese word derived from the native Yamato vocabulary: kotoba, which literally means "the foliage of speech."2There should be little doubt that Tezuka's choice was prompted by his desire to please Heidegger by playing the philosopher's own game-something that Tezuka totally succeeded in doing, as Heidegger's dialogue attests. Tezuka introduced a term that lent itself to etymological play-an enterprise very close to the heart of Heidegger, and one that was also very popular among Japanese thinkers.3 In fact, the expression kotoba incorporates the word koto, which means both "thing" and [End Page 555] "word" and which is found in the basic concepts of Japanese ontology: Mikoto (God, or "the honorable thing"), makoto (truth, or "the true word"), kotodama (soul, or "the spirit of words"), and kotowari(reason, or "the splitting of things"). The association of "words" and "things" in the Japanese word for "language" must have been of particular interest to Heidegger, who, four years before his meeting with Tezuka, had written "Das Ding" (The thing), a major lecture on the notion of things interpreted in light of the fourfold earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. In the dialogue Heidegger refers to this essay, in which "things" are presented in their objectified presence-the disparaged things that modernity and technology have dispossessed of their Being (Sein). Heidegger points out that never has the distance between things and Sein been as great as in modernity, when all distances in space and time have shrunk.4 Given the unflattering position that Heidegger had taken on the notion of "things," Tezuka was forced to come to the rescue of the Japanese word kotoba by endowing koto with the meaning of two Heideggerian keywords: "event" (kotogara) and "affair" (Sache). The thingly component of kotoba was not simply an objectifiable presence that can be counted, analyzed, and disposed of, but rather a poietic "act" that has the power to create a reality by transforming the named thing (koto) into a real thing (koto).In "A Dialogue... (shrink)

This essay examines one aspect of the wide-ranging philosophical background of the intellectual and dissident movement for human rights in one-time communist Czechoslovakia. I shall meditate on Jan Patočka 's finite responsibility, Derrida's aporetic emphasis on the infinite dimension of responsibility, and Lévinasian-Dostoyevskyan ethico-existential variations on in/finite responsibility. Havel alludes to hyperbolic ethics in a parenthetical remark on the birth of "Charta 77", the Manifesto for Human Rights in Czechoslovakia. The question before us is this: which dimension of responsibility appears (...) at this birth or, to put it otherwise, what responsibility is born in care for the soul and polis? (shrink)

Declarative sentences in English are either unqualified or qualified with an epistemic expression like a parenthetical verb. In this dissertation, I defend parentheticalism, the view that most apparently unqualified declaratives in English covertly contain the verb "know" with a first-person subject in parenthetical position. Paired with a multidimensional semantics for parenthetical verbs, parentheticalism predicts that the use of an apparently unqualified declarative represents the speaker as knowing the at-issue proposition expressed by the declarative in the context. Since the representation of (...) speaker knowledge is what the speech act of assertion is otherwise needed to explain, parentheticalism—by better explaining such knowledge representation—has the consequence that assertion is unnecessary for explaining what the use of a declarative typically does in a context. (shrink)

"Exhalation," a 2008 science fiction short story by Ted Chiang, virtuoso of the genre and the form, begins with a truism, refuted: "It has long been said that air (which others call argon) is the source of life. This is not in fact the case, and I engrave these words to describe how I came to understand the true source of life and, as a corollary, the means by which life will one day end" (37). The narrator's promise is so (...) alluring—knowledge of life's origin, knowledge of its expiration, and knowledge of the relation between the two—that we may be forgiven for overlooking the parenthetical. Argon amounts to less than one percent of the air breathed within Earth's atmosphere. The narrator specifies that "others call... Read More. (shrink)