Series: Arguing Linguistically

Sometimes, there are footnotes which force you -firstly- to read them several times, and -secondly- to read lots of literature to understand them. Here an example taken from Mittwoch (1982).

Series: Arguing Linguistically

Russell vs. Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein: “That which is merely empirical has not place in the discourse of the truth!”

His (Emmon Bach’s) second textbook, Syntactic Theory, came 10 years later and was widely influential. With that one, he had to fight a bit with the copy editor, who replaced “if and only if” everywhere with “if”, writing “Redundant” in the margin! (Emmon prevailed.)

“The disappointing message is that at the end of the day compositional semantics tells us next to nothing about the meaning of individual words.”

(Zimmermann & Sternefeld 2013)

“So to say that there is apple in the salad is to say that there is some stuff in the salad of the right sort as to qualify as apple and the latter involves appealing to our knowledge of the kind of apples or the property of being an apple. It should then fall out of our theory that particular apples are made of apple and so on.”

(Taken from Bach 1986)

Series: Arguing Linguistically

Grammaticality and Subtleness?? No way!!!!

Series: Arguing Linguistically

Cite everything you can, you don’t need to read it!