NYU Linguistics

In this talk I will argue that noun phrases that I will call 'reifying terms' belong to a single syntactic construction that goes along with a particular semantics, namely that of introding an object of reference on the basis of a non-referential expression (or non-referential use of an expression). I will focus on one type of reifying terms, namely the one illustrated below:

(1) a. the name John
    b. The fictional character Hamlet
(2) a. the numeral two
    b. the number two
(3) a. the color word green
    b. the color green

These noun phrases share a range of syntactic characteristics, many of which are shared by the constructions below, which are reifying terms of a second type:

(4) a. the fact that John likes Mary
    b. the possibility that it may rain
    c. the property of wisdom

In both cases, crucially, the semantic properties of the entire noun phrase are different from the semantic properties of the expression following the sortal head noun ('name', 'character', 'numeral, 'number', 'color', 'fact', etc). In fact, I will indicate that in general the latter has a non-referential status (or non-referential use) or quasi-referential status (as the expressions in question can generally go with predicates that can also go with referential terms). I will argue that the function of the sortal in this construction is to map the 'presentation' of the expression following it onto an object on the basis of (linguistic, fictional, or mathematical) contexts in which the expression occurs non-referentially. The construction thus serves to introduce language-driven or 'pleonastic entities' in roughly the sense of Schiffer.

More specifically, this means that natural language does not contain an operation of 'simple' quotation, forming an expression-referring term from a given expression and (here I will give only a sketch of the argument) that simple numerals do not as such refer to numbers.