Within the framework of discourse representation theory
(DRT), it quickly becomes apparent that proper names can explicitly denote sets
of individuals instead of individuals. A theory that insists on assigning type
<e> to proper names, while positing <<e, t>, t> for common
nouns, would thus have to employ an ad hoc mechanism of type conversion. This
mechanism would always expand the denotation of a proper name to a set when this
is required by the syntactic-semantic environment of the lexical item. One may
be tempted, for example, to propose that this mechanism is triggered by e.g.
plural, partitive, restrictive adverbials. However, proper names are in
overlapping distribution with common noun phrases that are typically assigned
type <<e, t>, t>, as in (10):
(10) I saw John,
the dog, one of the chairs, a dinosaur.
The verb see and, for that matter, any other
transitive verb, would have to have two subcategorization frames (cf. 11a and b)
in order to allow proper names as complements.
(11)
Since this would
increase the complexity of the semantics, Montague (1974) proposed to treat all
nominals alike as type <<e, t>, t>. Furthermore, the assumption of
different semantic types within the one category of nominals would severely
violate storage economy in the lexicon: virtually all lexical items that can
subcategorize for nominal expressions would need two entries – one for proper
names and one for common nouns.
One may possibly
propose a syntactically more refined structure that maintains <e> status
for proper names:
(12)
This strategy
only shifts the problem from the subcategorization frames of verbs to those of
determiners, since elements of category D can freely take common nouns or proper
names as complements. However, it reduces the problem of storage economy by an
order of magnitude, since D is a relatively small, closed class. Nevertheless, a
formal semantic system with type ambiguities is still suboptimal.
The DP hypothesis opens an interesting additional alternative: when English common nouns occur in a sentence, where they are interpreted as a set, they are always wrapped in a DP. The question may thus not be whether proper names are really sets, but whether common nouns are not, in fact, individuals, as in (13):
(13)
This alternative has some
intuitive appeal: the set status would be decided at the DP node and not depend
on information supplied by the complement, but rather on information supplied by
the head node, i.e. the determiner.
However, with
Burge (1973), I would argue that both common nouns and proper names have a
predicative quality that is not captured by the assignment <e> in
(12) and (13):
“A proper name occurring in a sentence used by a person [DRT: discourse participant] at a time designates an object [DRT: discourse referent] if and only if the person refers to that object at that time with that proper name, and the proper name is true of that object” (Burge 205-206).
Before I
investigate the syntactic details of proper names, I will first assess what
“being true of a discourse referent” may mean for a proper name.
© Philipp Strazny 1998