Conceptual alternatives
Brian Buccola, Manuel Kriz, Emmanuel Chemla
April 2021
 

Things we can say, and the ways in which we can say them, compete with one another. And this has consequences: words we decide not to pronounce have critical effects on the messages we end up conveying. For instance, in saying Chris is a good teacher, we may convey that Chris is not an amazing teacher. How this happens is an unsolvable problem, unless a theory of alternatives indicates what counts, among all the things that have not been pronounced. It is sometimes assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that any word counts, as long as that word could have replaced one that was actually pronounced. We review arguments for going beyond this powerful idea. In doing so, we argue that the level of words is not the right (or at least not the only) level of analysis for alternatives. Instead, we capitalize on recent conceptual and associated methodological advances within the study of the so-called "language of thought" to reopen the problem from a new perspective. Specifically, we provide theoretical and experimental arguments that the relation between alternatives and words may be indirect, and that alternatives are not merely linguistic objects in the traditional sense. Rather, we propose that competition in language is significantly determined by general reasoning preferences, or thought preferences (preferences which may have forged the lexicons of modern languages in the first place, as argued elsewhere). We propose that such non-linguistic preferences can be measured and that these measures can be used to explain linguistic competition, non-linguistically, and more in depth.

Note: The published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-021-09327-w.

Format: [ pdf ]
Reference: lingbuzz/003208
(please use that when you cite this article)
Published in: Linguistics and Philosophy (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-021-09327-w)
keywords: concepts, language of thought, formal semantics, linguistic competition, semantics
previous versions: v5 [February 2021]
v4 [August 2020]
v3 [June 2018]
v2 [March 2018]
v1 [November 2016]
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