Timeline for At what point in the syntactic hierarchy inside a clause do phrases acquire ‘propositional’ status?
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| Apr 27, 2015 at 21:21 | comment | added | jlawler | The 1998 second edition of McCawley's grammar is excellent on this subject. And, in particular, in the original question, sentence (c) is not a proposition. Questions are neither true nor false; like orders, prayers, greetings, and other speech acts, they may have felicity conditions, but they don't have truth conditions. As to negation, McCawley also gives quite a lot of evidence in his logic book that in natural language, negation is not truth-functional. After all, logic is just a stick-figure model of actual language, not its source. | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 13:00 | comment | added | user6814 | I do have and long ago read McCawley's textbook. I have not consulted it for a long time, though (since late 1988, probably), and I would not have expected it to help much in this respect, but I will check. Maybe his logic textbook 'All You Wanted to Know about Logic but Didn't Dare Ask' (if I remember correctly) did contain relevant info, too. I will check both, just in case. | |
| Jan 27, 2015 at 12:12 | history | answered | Greg Lee | CC BY-SA 3.0 |