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Syntax

What features are characteristic of language?

structure and re-usable gestures
Introduce the broad project : a theory of truth conditions.

S’s 13:11 utterance of ‘Earth is being warmed by human activity’ is true exactly if Earth is being warmed by human activity.

S’s 13:11 utterance of ‘Mars is being warmed by human activity’ is true exactly if Mars is being warmed by human activity.

‘A semantic theory for a particular natural language will … articulate an assignment of meanings to sentences …

Let’s just say truth conditions
All sentences! Uncountably many!

It will also display just how the sentences come to have the meanings they do, given their construction out of more basic constituents: it will reveal semantic structure. …

The recurrent contribution that a constituent expression makes to the meanings of several sentences in which it occurs will be revealed in the use of … the principle assigning a semantic property to that expression … in the derivations of meaning assignments for all those sentences”

\citep[p.~130]{Davies:1986qv}

(Davies 1986: 130).

How is constructing a semantic theory possible?

obstacle: there are uncountably many sentences.

\emph{Compositionality} The meaning of a sentence (and of any complex expression) is fully determined by its structure and the meanings of its constituent words.

[Compositionality]
The meaning of a sentence (and of any complex expression) is fully determined by its structure and the meanings of its constituent words.

What structure? Syntactic structure!

Semantics requires syntax.

Contrast to be explained:

‘Music makes swans purple above’ is an English sentence.

‘Water swans in swim’ is not an English sentence.

What does a syntact theory reveal?

I’m not going to be offering you the theory, I’m showing you what the theory entails

How can we discover the syntactic structure of a sentence you utter?

May be different between speakers.
Consider a phrase like 'the red ball'.
What is the syntactic structure of this noun phrase?
In principle there are two possibilities.

the red ball

‘I’ll play with this red ball and you can play with that one.’

Lidz et al (2003)

How can we decide between these?
Is the syntactic structure of ‘the red ball’ (a) flat or (b) hierachical?
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[scale=0.25]{../www.slides/src/raw/img/lidz_2003_fig0.neg.png}
\end{center}
\begin{center} from \citealp{lidz:2003_what} \end{center}
\begin{enumerate}
  1. \item ‘red ball’ is a constituent on (b) but not on (a)
  2. \item anaphoric pronouns can only refer to constituents
  3. \item In the sentence ‘I’ll play with this red ball and you can play with that one.’, the word ‘one’ is an anaphoric prononun that refers to ‘red ball’ (not just ball). \citep{lidz:2003_what,lidz:2004_reaffirming}.
\end{enumerate}

How can we discover the syntactic structure of a sentence you utter?

What I've just shown you is, in effect, how we can decide whihc way an adult human understands a phrase like 'the red ball'.
We can discover this by finding out how they understand a sentence like 'I’ll play with this red ball and you can play with that one.'.

Two Questions

What are the syntactic structures of those sentences?

What is the relation between these structures and those who utter them?

Our focus has been the first. The second question is where issues about ‘language faculty’ etc come up. This is somewhat analogous to our question about knowledge of reference. Except that few seriously doubt that the relation is psychological.
Recap:

How is constructing a semantic theory possible?

obstacle: there are uncountably many sentences.

[Compositionality]
The meaning of a sentence (and of any complex expression) is fully determined by its structure and the meanings of its constituent words.

So this was all about the structure (syntax) we need for a compositional theory of truth conditions ...

Summary

- The aim of semantics is to explain productivity and systematicity of language.

- We need semantics (not just syntax and pragmatics) in explaining how communication by language succeeds because languages are productive and systematic.

- Semantic theories attempt to explain systematicity and productivity by identifying compositional structure in languages.

- Success depends on discovering syntactic structures.

- Identifying compositional structure requires assigning semantic values to fragments of sentences; part of this is provided by the theory of reference.