Article/Publication Details

Two Kinds of Unarticulated Constituents

(Original title: Dva druhy neartikulovaných zložiek)
Organon F, 2012, vol. 19, Supplementary Issue 1, pp. 291-307.
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Abstract

It is often claimed that propositions expressed by certain kinds of sentence involve constituents that are unarticulated at the linguistic level. Two sorts of unarticulated constituents are sometimes distinguished in the literature – those that are explicitly unarticulated and those that are implicitly unarticulated. The main claim of the present paper is that, contrary to appearances, there are no implicitly unarticulated constituents and that all of them are in fact explicitly unarticulated ones. The argument runs as follows: If a propositional constituent is supposed to be implicitly unarticulated, it appears in the proposition on the basis of free enrichment (or expansion). On the other hand, if a propositional constituent is explicitly unarticulated, it appears in the proposition on the basis of another kind of process, namely saturation (or completion). However, it is shown that free enrichment (and expansion) leads to a serious problem concerning the unity of propositions. Consequently, if this problem is to be circumvented, free enrichment (and expansion) has to be rejected. As a result, implicitly unarticulated constituents have to be rejected as well.

Keywords

expansion, explicitly unarticulated constituent, free enrichment, implicitly unarticulated constituent, literal meaning, proposition expressed, propositional unity

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