Fictional Names: Reference, Definiteness and Ontology

fictional names

fictional names have been one of the most important and serious topics in the contemporary philosophy of language and metaphysics.several questions such as “do fictional names refer to any objects?” “are fictional characters existent objects?” have resulted in a considerable literature of philosophy. in this essay, we will follow two objectives. first we will describe and elaborate the ideas ...

Unravelling Names of Fictional Characters

In this paper we explore the correlation between the sound of words and their meaning, by testing if the polarity (‘good guy’ or ‘bad guy’) of a character’s role in a work of fiction can be predicted by the name of the character in the absence of any other context. Our approach is based on phonological and other features proposed in prior theoretical studies of fictional names. These features a...

Names and reference in user interfaces

This short paper argues that references in user interfaces, in particular names and the values they denote, are often designed in a way that is incomplete and inconsistent thereby causing problems for users. This paper explores names and values through illustrations in order to clear the way for a more systematic approach to the design of names and reference.

Direct Reference, Empty Names and Implicature

An Ontology of German Place Names

A dictionary of German toponyms (place names) was first constructed so that their linguistic features could be systematically described, i.e. their morphology and syntactic behaviour. The dictionary’s format is compatible with DELA (Courtois 2004), hence it can be used with Unitex and Intex (see Prolintex for a French equivalent). This software is used to implement local grammars which describe...