INTERPRETING CONCATENATION AND CONCATENATES

What is the significance of combining expressions in a natural human language? A complex expression is not a mere list of words. Combining expressions, as in 'red ball' or 'ball that Pat kicked yesterday' has a semantic effect. But how is the meaning of a phrase related to the meanings of its constituents? And how are the meanings of predicates, simple or complex, related to the meanings of sentences and referential devices? Such questions lie at the heart of attempts to understand the kind(s) of compositionality exhibited in human languages. Elsewhere, I have argued that concatenation signifies conjunction; see Pietroski (2002, 2003, 2005). On this view, phrases like 'red ball' manifest the true character of concatenation: combining 'red' with 'ball' yields a predicate satisfied by things that satisfy 'red' and 'ball'. But examples like (1) seem not to fit this mold. (1) Pat did not kick every ball yesterday How can all the constituents of (1) be plausibly analyzed in terms of monadic predicates conjoinable with others? And given such examples, why think concatenation signifies a single operation across diverse constructions, much less the operation of predicate-conjunction? My reply, developed in Pietroski (2005) but presented somewhat differently here, involves a supplementary hypothesis about the role of certain grammatical relations. While concatenation always signifies conjunction, combining a predicate with an argument—as in 'kicked it'—has a grammatical effect that introduces a second semantic factor that is absent in simple cases of combining two predicates. And while a sentence is not a mere conjunction of predicates, the " third " factor may be nothing more than existential closure. Given developments of Davidson's (1967, 1985) work, (2) can be analyzed as in (2a).