The semantics of existence

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• 作者：Friederike Moltmann (1)
  
• 关键词：Existence ; Existence predicates ; Bare plurals ; Kind terms ; Events ; States ; Individual ; level/stage ; level distinction ; Adverbial modifiers
• 刊名：Linguistics and Philosophy
• 出版年：2013
• 出版时间：February 2013
• 年：2013
• 卷：36
• 期：1
• 页码：31-63
• 全文大小：374KB
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• 作者单位：Friederike Moltmann (1)
  
  1. IHPST (Paris 1/ENS/CNRS), Paris, France
  
• ISSN：1573-0549

文摘

The notion of existence is a very puzzling one philosophically. Often philosophers have appealed to linguistic properties of sentences stating existence. However, the appeal to linguistic intuitions has generally not been systematic and without serious regard of relevant issues in linguistic semantics. This paper has two aims. On the one hand, it will look at statements of existence from a systematic linguistic point of view, in order to try to clarify what the actual semantics of such statements in fact is. On the other hand, it will explore what sort of ontology such statements reflect. The first aim is one of linguistic semantics; the second aim is one of descriptive metaphysics. Philosophically, existence statements appear to reflect the distinction between endurance and perdurance as well as particular notions of abstract states and of kinds. Linguistically, statements of existence involve a particular way of drawing the distinction between eventive and stative verbs and between individual-level and stage-level predicates as well as a particular approach to the semantics of bare plurals and mass nouns.