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{"id":15619,"date":"2014-03-04T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-04T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=626"},"modified":"2014-03-04T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-04T00:00:00","slug":"words-and-sentences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2014\/03\/words-and-sentences\/","title":{"rendered":"Words and Sentences"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Though \u201cword and sentence are interdependent,\u201d argues David Braine (Language and Human Understanding<\/a>, 2), yet \u201cneither is definable in terms of the other.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is most often acknowledged from one direction: An infinite number of sentences can be constructed from the finite resources of the lexical stock of a language. It works the other way too, of course: Words are \u201cmulti-potential in use, open to many sense or discourse-significances.\u201d<\/p>\n

That seems obvious enough, but Braine thinks it\u2019s overlooked by philosophers of language and linguists, who tend to prioritize word over sentence or sentence over word, \u201ccreating insoluble problems\u201d and putting \u201clanguage into an impossible straightjacket\u201d (5).<\/p>\n

He refers to the rival philosophies of Quine, Davidson, and Dummet, all of whom took the sentence as the locus of meaning. For their differences, \u201ctheir explanations always took one back to the conditions of truth, conditions of justified assertion or denial, conditions of fulfillment or obedience, experiences reported in sentences, or responses to sentences of others.\u201d But this \u201cput direct controls solely on sentence-meaning and use, and so gave only indirect or external access to the meanings or significances of words or other sentence constituents\u201d (4-5).<\/p>\n

If one takes account of language\u2019s use for expressing sense, then it\u2019s clear that \u201cit is words or other lexical factors in their context which are primary \u2013 at the level of understanding, the sentence or complete utterance has sense only through them\u201d (5). This approach also suggested that \u201cthe senses of words . . . can be worked out or calculated from sentence-meanings or uses,\u201d but this excludes the \u201cinformality\u201d of ordinary language, which uses words with a variety of different meanings. Braine finds a parallel rigidity in Chomsky, which allows \u201ceach lexical item . . . only one lexical meaning (or only one set of consequences for sentence-meanings)\u201d (5).<\/p>\n

Braine\u2019s very large book is an effort to \u201crestore the balance between word and sentence\u201d and to explain how \u201cword-meaning and sentence-meaning are interdependent and correlative\u201d (5-6).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"