D. Dowty ("Toward a Semantic Analysis of Verb Aspect and The English "Imperfective" Progressive"):
As it has been argued … that the futurate progressive of (26) ["John is leaving town tomorrow"] semantically involves some notion of planning, it might seem that the event of leaving described in (26) may, after all, be 'in progress' in this loose sense. Though this line of thinking may have merit, to pursue it would quickly lead us into the very difficult but fascinating questions of how humans conceive of events as grouped together into causally and temporally related 'meta-events' involving intentions as well as actions, and I doubt that such investigations would lead us to productive results in model-theoretic semantics anytime soon (p 67)
One might be tempted to say on reading this "that's why he's a linguist, not a philosopher", but even granting that one might think that a linguist's interest in language should have something to do with the way humans communicate, and that his or her ambition shouldn't be to advance the state of model theory but to pursue routes, even routes that hold little immediate promise for model theory, that will lead to enlightenment about that communication. But if you like model-theoretic semantics then that's that, I suppose. (Though the last paper I read about this, Landman's "The Progressive", had the amusing feature that the analysis, rich in lambdas and backwards Es and whatnot, in the end turned on what it is reasonable to believe might happen.) More worrying to me is the actual proposal he gives:
[PROG φ] is true at I and w iff there is an interval I' such that I ⊂ I' and there is a world w' for which φ is true at I' and w', and w is exactly like w'sic, I assume this means "including"] I.
Of everything you might worry about here, I want to ask this: what sort of a thing is φ? It is both something that can be operated on to yield a progressive sentence such as "John is crossing the street", and also something that is truth-apt. The perhaps most natural candidate, "John crosses the street", doesn't work, because even though it can be true or false it can't be given the right sort of reading. Another candidate that will flip truth values in the way we want could be "John crossed the street" (going this route would incline you, perhaps, to the way of thinking about events and processes R. Stout gives in Things That Happen Because They Should[1]), but then, since Dowty for independent reasons wants the interval I to be the smallest "over which the appropriate change-of-state takes place", John will only be crossing the street at the moment at which it becomes true that he has crossed it (nor will the so-called imperfective paradox hold). It is presumably (I can't recall the precise reasoning) for considerations along these lines that Galton has his progressive-creating operator operate not on propositions but on what he calls event radicals—here it would be John-CROSS-the-street—which are not truth-apt. Or perhaps φ isn't a non-progressive proposition at all, but rather a closed-progressive proposition, that is, one in which the truth of the present licenses the inferences to the truth of the future perfect. (This seems generally to be given as the licensed inference from the simple past/past progressive to the perfect, but I don't think it makes much difference.[2]) I am pretty certain that's not what Dowty is thinking of, but it might work. It doesn't help very much with understanding the progressive, certainly. It would actually be somewhat similar to Galton's official account, and I think it has a weak point in that "smallest interval" thing: without the smallest interval all sorts of crazy propositions are true (for instance, my house is burning down), but its inclusion creates a problem involving identifying what the interval over which the change of state taking place is, or would be like, and when it begins—which you might think just reduces to knowing when the analysandum is true. (An example: it is not really clear at what point a house burning down starts burning down. I mean at what point the house is burning down. The drapes being on fire doesn't get it.) I suspect that we will end up thrown back onto the problem of how humans group events (or, since I don't mind countenancing them, processes) together, even without intentions.
[1] You would think a book with this title would be similar to the one Carnap wrote about what he learned from Col. Parker, but no.
[2] Actually there is this difference: From "he is pushing a cart" you can infer both "he will have pushed a cart"[3] and "he has pushed a cart", but even if you could infer "he will have drawn a circle" from "he is drawing a circle", you couldn't infer "he has drawn a circle". So the past-tense case is simpler.
[3] On the reading of this where all it means is that it will in the future be the case that he has pushed a cart, and not (what is really the more natural reading) that there will have been a cart-pushing by him between now and some point in the future, which possibly started before now but will, if so, extend past now.
Recent Comments