Tropes, Bare Demonstratives, and Apparent Statement of Identity


Συγγραφέας: Friederike Moltmann


Friederike Moltmann: Tropes, Bare Demonstratives, and Apparent Statement of Identity (pdf, 28 pages)
Philosophers who accept tropes generally agree that tropes do play a role in the semantics of natural language, namely as the objects of reference of nominalizations of adjectives, such as Socrates’ wisdom or the beauty of the landscape. In fact, a philosophical discussion of the ontology of tropes can hardly do without the use of such nominalizations. In this paper, I will argue that tropes play a further important role in the semantics of natural language, namely in the semantics of bare demonstratives like this and that. This and that can act as trope-referring terms in contexts of reports of direct perception, but more importantly they involve reference to tropes in what in linguistics is called identificational sentences, sentences such as (1a) and (1b):