The chapter presents a range of reasons from both popular and philosophical sources as why we should care about the fact that minority languages go extinct-from the potential loss of scientific knowledge that might happen only to be captured in an endangered language to the role speaking a language plays in the self-conception of its speakers-before sketching his own view, according to which certain speech acts are only performable in a given language, and so language extinction can lead to silencing. This chapter discusses the moral and prudential value of preserving endangered languages. 281-297 Chapter in book (Refereed) Abstract Springer, 2021 KeywordsComplex demonstratives, Definite descriptions, Semantics, Pragmatics, Presupposition They fatally undermine the ambiguity theory and demand a fundamental rethinking of the hidden argument approach.

In this paper, I argue that Wolter’s results, properly understood, upend the philosophical status quo. thesis, University of California at Santa Cruz, 2006), however, has shown that complex demonstratives admit non-deictic interpretations only when a precise set of structural constrains are met. Wolter (That’s That the Semantics and Pragmatics of Demonstrative Noun Phrases. The same prediction follows from ‘hidden argument’ theories like the ones described by King (Complex Demonstratives: a Quantificational Account, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2001) and Elbourne (Situations and Individuals, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005). If such readings are the result of a lexical ambiguity, as Kaplan (in: Almog, Perry, Wettstein (eds) Themes from Kaplan, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977) and others suggest, we should expect them to be available wherever a definite description can be used. Standard semantic theories predict that non-deictic readings for complex demonstratives should be much more widely available than they in fact are.

2865-2900 Article in journal (Refereed) Published Abstract

Portal 2 with ethan