PHIL 3225 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Syntactic Ambiguity, Polysemy, Gerund
27 Feb 2018
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"boats") which is singular and requires a singular verb is. " "sinking boats are entertaining. " (the subject here is the noun "boats" (which the participle. "sinking" modifies); since "boats" is plural, "are" is required. This is why szab had to use "can be": to preserve the syntactic ambiguity. Paragraph 1: charles travis"s thesis: various things (propositions) may be expressed by the same declarative sentence. A proposition is the context that a declarative sentence expresses. It has a truth-condition and truth-value, so if it can be shown that the proposition that a sentence expresses has different truth-values in different contexts, then pc is undermined. Travis believes that meaning (content) depends on context since meaning determines truth- conditions: the leaf is green. A brown leaf that has been painted green: in sorting leaves by color we may truly call it green. , in describing leaves to identify species, it would be false to call it green.
