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Some remarks on the word “be” and other existential expressions
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Jacek Wojtysiak,
Published/Copyright:
February 18, 2012
Abstract
This paper concerns existential expressions (EE), especially the verb “be” and its equivalents in different languages of the world. EE are expressions that can refer to being or to existence. I sketch the lexicology, semantics, syntax (with Ajdukiewicz's tools), and pragmatics of EE and I point out the connections of EE with different alternative ontologies (“latent,” as Kahn says, in the natural language). I also indicate some ontological (existential) problems in formal logic. My conclusion is that the central function of Be is predicative (copulative) and Be means “to be so-and-so” or “to have a property.”
Published Online: 2012-02-18
Published in Print: 2012-February
© 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Prelims
- Semiotics and logic: Pragmatization of the common ground
- Meaning between sense and reference: Impacts of semiotics on philosophy of science
- Where does logic meet semiotics?
- The correspondence theory of truth
- The intent to lie
- Reasoning in belief contexts
- Pragmatic constraints of meaning: An inferentialist approach
- On common knowledge in conversation
- Proofs and mistakes: Their syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics
- Object realism versus mathematical structuralism
- Indeterministic tense operators and the concept of time as a substance
- Counterfactual semantics and quantum physics
- The ultimate strengthening of the Turing Test?
- Is computation based on interpretation?
- The troubles with ontological primacy
- Some remarks on the word “be” and other existential expressions
- The evolution of scientific languages in Ajdukiewicz and Kuhn
- The core of grammar
- The grammar of philosophical discourse
- Semantic bounds for everyday language
- Demonstrative descriptions and conventional implicatures
- Does the Twin-Earth argument rest on a fallacy of equivocation?
