inadequacy of descriptive theories to account for the mechanism of reference led to the emergence of the direct reference theory. this theory, however, has its own problems. if the only component of the meaning of a proper name is its referent, then how is it that the substitution of two co-referent proper names in propositional attitude sentences changes the truth value of the sentence? the pr...

Interpretive constraints on anaphors in intensional complements suggest that de re LFs can’t yield de se truth conditions and, in fact, generate anti-de se inferences in the pragmatics.

In this paper I argue that in addition to the three generally recognized kinds of de re thought, i.e., perception-based, memory-based and communication-based thought, there is a kind of de re thought, which is based on image and cannot be assimilated to any of these recognized kinds of de re thought. I call it simply image-based de re thought. Although image-based thought shares some similariti...

Articles in general and definite articles in particular can create problems even long after all other aspects of English have been mastered. The present article investigated the learnability problems related to the acquisition of count-mass distinction of English nominals by Persian L2 learners. The theoretical underpinning of the study is the interpretability hypothesis (Tsimpli & Dimitrakopou...

The paper deals with hot problems of current semantics that are interconnected with a fundamental question What is the meaning of a natural language expression? Our explication of the meaning is based on the key notion of Tichy’s Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL), namely that of the logical construction, an entity structured from the ‘algorithmic point of view’ (procedure), the structure of w...

Expressions designating collectives, such as “the committee” or “the ships in the port”, may be interpreted de re or de dicto, depending on context, according as they pick out collectives defined by their members or collectives defined by some criterion for membership. We call these E(xtensional)-collectives and I(ntensional)-collectives respectively, and in this paper we explore in depth the r...