Re: veridicality in English

[And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>]

John:
> > I don't accept these as counterexamples. "Veridical/nonveridical"
> > do not mean "true/false". They mean "asserted (by the speaker)
> > to be true/false".
>
> I use the term "veridical description" to mean "a description
> whose truthful applicability to its referent is *essential* to the
> truth-claim of the surrounding sentence".

Yes. This is a clear version of what I should have said.

> Either "the" or "a" can prefix a veridical description in
> English.  If I say "There's a horse in that field", this cannot
> be true unless the referent really is a horse.

I agree.

> Likewise, if I say
> (with Paul Revere) "The British [persons] are coming!", this cannot be
> true unless it is the British who are coming.

I believe this is a misreport of the facts of English. Some weeks
ago I discussed an example (taken from McCawley): "the man
standing over there drinking a martini" - here I'm not claiming
that he's drinking a martini; I'm just describing him to help
you identify who I'm talking about. Hence THE is nonveridical.

> Likewise, the use of "a" to indicate a new referent can override
> any default veridicality.  The narrative use of  "A man went to the
> store yesterday" does not require that the referent really is a man.

? I don't see what you mean.

> Rather, I take the traditional view:  "the"/"a" do not encode
> specificity or veridicality except by accident.  What they primarily
> encode is definiteness (defined as "listener knows what's meant").

Yes, they do primarily encode definiteness, but the weight of
evidence suggests that THE also happens to be nonveridical. I
haven't checked whether this is so of other determiners too, but
I ould expect it to be true of all definites.

--And