TY - JOUR
T1 - Truthmaker Semantics and Natural Language Semantics
AU - Champollion, Lucas
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 The Author(s). Language and Linguistics Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
PY - 2025/1/1
Y1 - 2025/1/1
N2 - Truthmaker semantics is a non-classical logical framework that has recently garnered significant interest in philosophy, logic, and natural language semantics. It redefines the propositional connectives and gives rise to more fine-grained entailment relations than classical logic. In its model theory, truth is not determined with respect to possible worlds, but with respect to truthmakers, such as states or events. Unlike possible worlds, these truthmakers may be partial; they may be either coherent or incoherent; and they are understood to be exactly or wholly relevant to the truth of the sentences they verify. Truthmaker semantics generalises collective, fusion-based theories of conjunction; alternative-based theories of disjunction; and nonstandard negation semantics. This article provides a gentle introduction to truthmaker semantics aimed at linguists; describes applications to various natural language phenomena such as imperatives, ignorance implicatures, and negative events; and discusses its similarities and differences to related frameworks such as event semantics, situation semantics, alternative semantics, and inquisitive semantics.
AB - Truthmaker semantics is a non-classical logical framework that has recently garnered significant interest in philosophy, logic, and natural language semantics. It redefines the propositional connectives and gives rise to more fine-grained entailment relations than classical logic. In its model theory, truth is not determined with respect to possible worlds, but with respect to truthmakers, such as states or events. Unlike possible worlds, these truthmakers may be partial; they may be either coherent or incoherent; and they are understood to be exactly or wholly relevant to the truth of the sentences they verify. Truthmaker semantics generalises collective, fusion-based theories of conjunction; alternative-based theories of disjunction; and nonstandard negation semantics. This article provides a gentle introduction to truthmaker semantics aimed at linguists; describes applications to various natural language phenomena such as imperatives, ignorance implicatures, and negative events; and discusses its similarities and differences to related frameworks such as event semantics, situation semantics, alternative semantics, and inquisitive semantics.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85209885587&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85209885587&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/lnc3.70004
DO - 10.1111/lnc3.70004
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85209885587
SN - 1749-818X
VL - 19
JO - Language and Linguistics Compass
JF - Language and Linguistics Compass
IS - 1
M1 - e70004
ER -