That’s true, but when we’re looking at natural languages that’s not a super useful perspective to take because natural languages care a lot about how information is packaged. From a linguistic point of view, predication is a way of packaging information with a topic-comment structure. The topic can be thought of as a ”discourse file” and the comment can be thought as information that is being added to that file. Reference can be thought of as opening a new file or accessing a pre-existing one.
I slightly mispoke earlier when I paired adjectives with “attributing”, the function Croft pairs it with is actually “modification”. Modification is like adding supplementary information to a file.
It‘s a linguistic universal that when it comes to concrete material object concepts like “being a cat“, “being a rock” etc, there is a strong preference for packaging this information as a topic in the discourse rather than a comment. On the other hand, for action concepts like “walking”, there is a strong preference for packaging this information as a comment that is explicitly being added to a discourse file. All languages allow you to use nonprototypical combinations of semantic class and information packaging function though—It is possible to add the info that something is a cat to a pre-existing discourse file, it’s just not as common.
Predicate logic doesn’t really have discourse files, unless you think of quantification as opening an empty file.
That’s true, but when we’re looking at natural languages that’s not a super useful perspective to take because natural languages care a lot about how information is packaged. From a linguistic point of view, predication is a way of packaging information with a topic-comment structure. The topic can be thought of as a ”discourse file” and the comment can be thought as information that is being added to that file. Reference can be thought of as opening a new file or accessing a pre-existing one.
I slightly mispoke earlier when I paired adjectives with “attributing”, the function Croft pairs it with is actually “modification”. Modification is like adding supplementary information to a file.
It‘s a linguistic universal that when it comes to concrete material object concepts like “being a cat“, “being a rock” etc, there is a strong preference for packaging this information as a topic in the discourse rather than a comment. On the other hand, for action concepts like “walking”, there is a strong preference for packaging this information as a comment that is explicitly being added to a discourse file. All languages allow you to use nonprototypical combinations of semantic class and information packaging function though—It is possible to add the info that something is a cat to a pre-existing discourse file, it’s just not as common.
Predicate logic doesn’t really have discourse files, unless you think of quantification as opening an empty file.