Publication Details

Abstract

It is sometimes claimed that the semantic (i.e., truthconditional) content of an utterance consists of the semantic contents of its constituting expressions and their mode of composition, i.e., all constituents of the semantic content correspond to some linguistic item in the sentence uttered or other. This is claimed in particular by the proponents of the socalled semantic minimalism. The paper aims to show that indexicalism, which is often supposed to be a rival to semantic minimalism, is in fact a version of it. Indexicalism is willing to recognize, over and above explicit linguistic items, also the implicit ones. It is argued in the paper that semantic minimalism is capable to accommodate this idea without much ado.