Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

It is generally believed that natural languages have lots of contextually sensitive expressions.  In addition to familiar examples like ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘today, ‘he’, ‘that’ and so on that everyone takes to be contextually sensitive, examples of expressions that many would take to be contextually sensitive include tense, modals, gradable adjectives, relational terms (‘local’; ‘enemy’), possessives (‘Annie’s book’) and quantifiers (via quantifier domains).  With the exception of contextually sensitive expressions discussed by Kaplan [1977], there has not been a lot of discussion as to the mechanism whereby contextually sensitive expressions get their values in context, aside from vague references to speakers’ intentions.   In the present paper I propose a candidate for being this mechanism and defend the claim that it is such.