Truth without Predication

The Role of Placing in the Existential There-Sentence

R. Szekely

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137483287
• eBook ISBN: 9781137483294
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Linguistics

This book contains an original analysis of the existential there-sentence from a philosophical-linguistic perspective. At its core is the claim that there-sentences' form is distinct from that of ordinary subject–predicate sentences, and that this fundamental difference explains the construction's unusual grammatical and discourse properties.

1

Introduction

This book takes as its starting point a suggestion made by P. F. Strawson in Part II of Individuals (1959). There, Strawson is concerned with establishing a philosophical foundation for the subject–predicate distinction, which had come under attack (see, for example, Ramsay 1925) and, in doing so, to explicate the linguistic basis of the individuation of objects. In this connection (pp. 202ff.), he asks whether there are forms of language so basic that they lack predication altogether. According to Strawson, sentences of this kind should not contain any expressions that refer to, or presuppose, the existence of individuals, including sortal or characterizing universals. Strawson suggests “There is water here” as a candidate for this kind of sentence, which he calls a “feature-placing” sentence, because in using this sentence one merely “places” a “feature.”¹

Strawson does not intend his discussion of feature-placing as an analysis of the existential there-sentence, but this is the crux of my research and the overall aim of this book. I elaborate on Strawson’s foundational proposals concerning feature-placing and connect them to the grammatical and discourse properties of the existential construction (or there-sentence) in English: its unusual form, the restrictions that govern the expressions it may contain, and its use.

Strawson’s characterization of features and placers matches up strikingly with the grammatical and discourse properties of there-sentences. In an English there-sentence, the expression in subject position lacks the properties of canonical subjects (for example, it does not accomplish verb agreement), and the definiteness and quantificational force of the postverbal NP² is restricted. The expressions that can stand in postverbal position—indefinites and so-called “weak” quantificational NPs—are well described by the term feature, which Strawson uses to exclude expressions that include in their meaning criteria for distinctness (from other entities of the same kind) and reidentification.³ Furthermore, the expressions that are possible in the “coda” of this construction (the constituent following the NP) are predominantly locative prepositional phrases or other comparable expressions, and are aptly described by the term placer.

Strawson’s characterization of feature-placing also corresponds elegantly to the function of there-sentences in discourse, which is primarily to introduce⁴ new entities. There are, of course, many ways to present an object, such that it is possible to go on to say something about it. “Introducing new entities” therefore encompasses a number of different speech acts, including asserting the existence of an entity (for example, Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus); asserting the presence, or absence, of an entity of a particular kind (for example, upon looking into a bare cupboard: There’s no coffee!); issuing a reminder about an entity’s presence (for example, Then there was that resentment⁵); and listing entities that fit some particular bill (for example, Who can we get to fix the sink? Well, there’s John). These uses have in common the effect of bringing an entity into relief—not by referring to it, but by indicating its location, according to the feature-placing view.

The importance of spatiotemporal location⁶ and extra-linguistic context is also common to demonstrative identification and other sentence forms that have been called impersonal for their lack of referential subject, such as weather-it sentences (for example, It’s raining). In fact, both Strawson (1959) and later Lyons (1967, 1975) argue that the demonstrative identification of particulars, as exemplified in sentences such as “That is a bee” or “This is a flower,” is connected to the nondemonstrative introduction of particulars that occurs in there-sentences. In Strawson’s view, this is because we possess a conceptual scheme that has, as its organizing principle, the spatiotemporal location of particulars relative to us. This conceptual structure, according to Strawson, extends equally to things we can locate spatiotemporally and things we cannot (for example, abstract objects such as numbers, and God), by extrapolation from what Strawson regards as the simplest cases—again, those of demonstrative identification (of physical objects).

According to Strawson, this spatiotemporal framework underlies not only our conception of objects but also the language we use to introduce them, or to indicate their existence, on the feature-placing view. And here lies the connection between demonstrative identification and the there-sentence: It is specifically in relation to context that the there-sentences Strawson examines are similar to demonstratives, expressions which are dependent on the context for their meaning and connection to objects in the world. In every case of feature-placing that Strawson considers, there are (contextually supplied) indexical elements for space and time (here and now), as, for example, in There is water (here). Yet the there-sentence does not require context to supply the referent of some expressions, as is the case with demonstratives (such as that), but rather a location.

For Strawson, a direct connection to the here and now is necessary to feature-placing, but I propose that there is nothing special about the here and now. I shall diverge from Strawson’s original proposal in this respect, and include under the heading of feature-placing sentences both there-sentences with a contextually supplied location (for example, We visited a very small town. There was no post office) and there-sentences in which location is linguistically expressed (for example, There’s coffee in the cupboard next to the fridge).

Notice that, even among the there-sentences whose location is contextually supplied—which are mostly coda-less—there is no restriction to the here and now. The context, linguistic or otherwise, may also supply some previously mentioned location, as in the post office example above. Consequently, the requirement that the object indicated by the feature be directly locatable will not play a part in my account of feature-placing, as it does in Strawson’s. In the view proposed here, placers may be not only indexical—as they often are in the coda-less there-sentence—but also anaphoric (to a previously mentioned location), or referential (for example, in the cupboard next to the fridge) (see also Francez 2010 for an analysis of the relation of coda-less existentials to context).

The picture of feature-placing that emerges, after we drop Strawson’s original restriction on placers to demonstrative-like placer elements, nonetheless reserves a crucial role for location. Placing anchors the feature; only together do a feature and placer introduce an entity into the discourse.

The role played by location in what follows should be distinguished from the role it has played in other theories that take location to be a crucial part of the analysis of this sentence type. Importantly, I will not posit an underlying similarity between there-sentences and locative copular sentences, two sentence types that are usually related on a “locative analysis” (see Clark 1978, Freeze 1992, Kuno 1971, Lyons 1967, among others). While truth-conditionally equivalent, the function and underlying predication structures of these two sentence types will be distinguished on the feature-placing account.

One of Strawson’s chief concerns in Individuals is to probe the foundations of the distinction between subject and predicate. He does this by examining forms of thought and language that precede or underlie individuating thought about, and reference to, particulars. Reference to particulars unfolds in stages, in a trajectory that begins with the indication of a feature at a location (feature-placing), continues to the introduction and individuation of an individual, and ends in singular reference. Along this path, of course, the most common use of the there-sentence—that of introducing individuals—precedes singular reference, which picks out individuals that have already been introduced. The use of there-sentences in the discourse and the role they play in the genesis of reference to particulars are the foundation for the account of discourse anaphora and the distinction between specific and nonspecific indefinites in there-sentences developed in Chapters 2 and 3.

Strawson introduces feature-placing in an attempt not to undermine, but rather to bolster, the traditional distinction between subject and predicate. He emphasizes that sentences of the feature-placing form would be of limited use as the basis of an entire language. And indeed, the there-sentence can be used for a restricted number of speech acts compared to subject–predicate sentences. It is therefore not a question of feature-placing versus subject–predicate, but rather, feature-placing in addition to subject–predicate. Despite this, no such alternative sentence form, even one with limited scope as compared to subject–predicate, is part of current linguistic or philosophical analysis. As we shall see in Chapter 2, even those who have adopted Brentano’s distinction between the categorical and thetic forms have not, in their elaboration of this distinction, abandoned the subject–predicate distinction entirely. This book attempts to do just that—to flesh out an account of feature-placing as a grammatical analysis of there-sentences, and in doing so, give a positive answer to the question of whether there are sentence types that are better analyzed as not being subject–predicate in form at any level of representation.

And, while keeping the circumscribed role of the feature-placing form in mind, it is worthwhile to consider Ramsay’s (1925) claim that insisting on the subject–predicate form for all sentences is more for the convenience of mathematicians than a principle of natural language. There are, of course, many uses of language that, for example, do not bear a truth-value (for example, threats, promises, requests, and, closer to the current focus, the list-existential), and yet, truth conditions are at the core of semantic analysis. It is left to the reader to decide whether the facts, and the alternative analysis presented here, merit giving up the idea that all sentences share a single form.

There-sentences, existence and the subject–predicate form

Sentences such as “There is a cat on the mat” and “There is a Santa Claus” are unusual in a number of ways. Unlike other sentences that involve existence (for example, John exists), existential there-sentences do not ordinarily allow expressions that presuppose the existence of an individual, because they are used to assert it.⁷ Indeed, expressions that carry existence presuppositions are prohibited from the postverbal position in existential sentences of the there-form, at least in English.⁸ There-sentences are also peculiar in their syntactic and semantic form: the expression in syntactic subject position is an expletive, there, and, while there has some properties of subjects, for example, it undergoes subject–auxiliary inversion, it does not seem to be a subject in the usual sense. It does not invariably determine agreement on the finite verb; it is also not the item about which the rest of the sentence predicates some property.

This last characteristic of the there-sentence separates it from another kind of sentence that might also be called “existential.” A sentence such as “John exists,” for example, does appear to predicate the property “existence” of some individual, John, and appears to be subject–predicate in form. And yet, we shall see in Chapter 5 that exist-sentences and there-sentences are not true of the same set of entities. And now, consider the sentence “John does not exist”: Does it mean that John has the property of not existing? And what then of “Pegasus does not exist”? Can it be used to predicate not-existence of a nonexistent?

The problem of negative existence has been the subject of philosophical inquiry since antiquity (see Plato’s Sophist c.360 BC), and, at least since the time of Kant (1781), philosophers and logicians have, in considering the problem of negative existence, come to recognize the unique contribution of existential sentences to the discourse and also their unusual form, debating whether they should be represented as “normal” predications or whether they merit a separate classification. The present research follows the latter course, the chief claim being that the alternative form of the existential sentence explains its most fundamental characteristics—the restrictions on the kinds of constituents it may contain, the way it comes to express existence, the role of location and locative expressions, and the absence of an ordinary subject or subject–predicate relationship. The “alternative form” of a feature-placing sentence in the present account consists of a feature and a placer—not a subject and a predicate, or a predicate without a subject, or a subject without a predicate.

The positing of this alternative form contributes to a larger picture of how language connects with the world. It is, of course, customary to talk about this relationship in terms of reference or extension. In such a view, the truth of any sentence on a given occasion of use depends on whether the item denoted (or referred to) by the subject has the property denoted (or referred to) by the predicate.

And yet, one might imagine other ways of representing the relationships that obtain between items and properties in the world. In this book, I claim that the existential there-sentence exemplifies such an alternative representation: that it provides a second way of arriving at a truth-bearing unit in natural language, in addition to that of predication.

Following Strawson, I call this second route feature-placing. It will be argued that placing, unlike predication, does not involve a function whose arguments (individual constants, variables) pick out individuals, but rather, one that places features, and that successfully placing a feature requires there to be an instance of that feature instantiated by an item in the world at the location given by the placer.

The two routes

Strawson (1959) claims that there are sentences whose truth derives from the correct placing of a feature rather than from an item falling under a predicate. He exemplifies the feature-placing form using a there-sentence, “There is gold here.” How does this route to truth differ from the one normally assumed? To answer this question, it will be necessary to elaborate on Strawson’s brief discussion of feature-placing in order to bring it further into the realm of linguistic analysis.

Firstly, feature-placing sentences introduce entities, and are appropriately used only when the satisfying item is not given.⁹ Items that are not given are not presupposed to exist. There-sentences assert, but do not presuppose, the existence of the entities they introduce. This restriction against given or presupposed material differentiates feature-placing sentences from subject–predicate sentences, whose subject may either be given or not.

Secondl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Feature-Placing
• 3 Features
• 4 Placers
• 5 The Verb in There-Sentences
• 6 Negation in There-Sentences
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index