Dick:
> And to Nik:
> >Hang on -- the minor failure would be not coming up with Dick's suggestion
> >that the conceptual hierarchy contains the concepts Proposition and Soa,
> >and that soas are 'content' of propositions. But given (i) and (ii), I
> >don't see why you necessarily need to adopt Dick's '2nd referent',
> >which seems like an ad hoc but workable starting point for a more
> >refined analysis.
> ## Quite right - my 'second referent' was a stop gap. I hope we'll be able
> to improve on it very soon.
>
> (i) doesn't require '2nd referent'. As for (ii), one
> >needs to consider the constructions. There's finite verbs, but if you can
> >somehow separate out the finiteness ('IP') from the verb ('VP'), then '2nd
> >referent' is just referent of the finiteness.
> ## I don't think it can be linked to finiteness because languages that have
> no finiteness (e.g. Chinese) still have illocutionary forces; and all those
> special verbless constructions like "What about a cup of tea?" and "Down
> with the government!" are linked to a specific illocutionary force.
>
> >Perhaps more problematic is
> >the occurrence of epistemic adverbials in nonfinite predicative
> constructions,
> >e.g. "With John probably now married", where "now" is predicated of the
> >soa and "probably" is predicated of the proposition.
> ## Yes.
We should distinguish between having illoc force and referring
to a proposition. It is only finite clauses -- and perhaps sentences in
general -- that refer to propositions [setting aside the problem cases I
mentioned], but only (matrix) sentences (and perhaps a few other things
such as nonrestrictive relative clauses) that have illocutionary force.
--And.
