All the Superhero's Names

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All the Superhero's Names

Journal Title: Studia Semiotyczne - Year 2016, Vol 0, Issue 2

Abstract

In this paper I concern myself with The Superman Puzzle (the phenomenon of the substitution failure of co-referential proper names in simple sentences). I argue that the descriptive content associated with proper names, besides determining the proper name’s reference, function as truth-conditionally relevant adjuncts which can be used to express a manner, reason, goal, time or purpose of action. In that way a sentence with a proper name “NN is doing something” could be understood as “NN is doing something as NN” (which means “as-soand-so”). I argue that the substitution of names can fail on modified readings because the different descriptive content of proper names modifies the main predicate differently. Here I present a formal representation of modified predicates which allows one to model intuitively the different truth-conditions of sentences from The Puzzle.

Authors and Affiliations

Olga Poller

Keywords

The Superman Puzzle proper names substitution failure qualifying prepositional phrases modified predicates descriptivism adjuncts pseudonyms simple sentences

EP ID EP172846
DOI -
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