Abstract
AbstractPirahã tense is interesting because non-transparent temporal interpretations require more information than the syntax (or the pragmatics) provides. Moreover, not only are temporal interpretations in Pirahã underdetermined by Pirahã syntax, but this underdetermination provides yet more evidence against what one might label ‘naive compositionality’—the idea that meanings are provided Montague-style by mappings from syntax to semantics. However, if we reinterpret compositionality as a subtype of inference in the Peircean sense, we are able not only to understand better some peculiarities in the relationship between Pirahã language and cognition but also to predict (as per Everett 2017 and Barham and Everett 2020) ‘degrees of fit’ between morphosyntactic structures, meanings, and cultures across languages, leading to an informal typology of language types that includes languages without sentential recursion (e.g., but not limited to, Pirahã). Finally, Pirahã temporal semantics is interesting because it forces an adjustment of Reichenbach’s theory of tense
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford
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