Linguistics Seminar - Paolo Acquaviva

Seminar Title: Nominal labelling, word meaning, and the Conceptual-Intentional Interface
Abstract: The idea that words carve up thought is certainly very plausible, but it remains an analogy. Beside not saying anything about 'words' and 'thought', it implicitly identifies the semantic content of words with conceptual content. Taking words as structured products of grammatical knowledge certainly helps define what is specifically linguistic about word-encapsulated conceptual content, but it risks reducing it to purely formal schemata like 'mass-like entity' or 'dynamic event leading to a state'. This contribution aims at posing the problem and at bringing it into focus with particular reference to nouns: what does the language-internal property of being nominal (a label in an abstract symbolic representation) "mean" in language-independent conceptual terms? What phenomena can be brought to bear on the question? A beginning of an answer, I propose that nouns are most fundamentally names for sorts, or categories of entities. A conceptualization as 'entity' is pre-linguistic, but nominality, as the linguistic expression of it, shapes the way we can conceptualize things linguistically, for instance allowing maximally underspecified entity terms ('thing'), and disallowing terms for tropes like 'the redness of this carpet', which are thinkable but not expressible as single nouns. In sum, this is an attempt to specify the nature and boundaries of thinking-through-language.