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发表于 2009-10-26 01:34:35
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The distinction, as we now have it, encourages a scepticism
such as Ramsey’s. We have a vaguely expressed contrast between Aexpressions
which introduce their terms in the substantival style,
and B-expressions which introduce their terms in the assertive style.
This contrast derives from, and in part depends on, familiar
grammatical classifications, particularly the classification
‘substantive’, about which we have said independently, little enough,
except that it is the form which we naturally use when we want
merely to list terms. We may well now ask, with Ramsey: How could
such a distinction be of fundamental importance for logic and
philosophy? Since both A-expressions and B-expressions introduce
terms, and the difference is merely that B-expressions also carry the
assertive indication, the prepositional link, could we not undermine
the whole distinction by merely making the prepositional link
something separate in the sentence, not part of a term-introducing
expression? Could we not imagine simple sentences in which termintroducing
expressions merely introduce terms, in no particular style,
and in which the syntactical jobs at present performed by variations
in the style of term-introduction were allotted to linguistic devices
other than term-introducing expressions? Should we not thereby
undercut the subject-predicate distinction completely? So thinking,
we echo Ramsey’s remark that one has only to question, in order to
doubt, the assumption ‘that if a proposition consists of two terms
copulated, the two terms must be functioning in different ways, one
as subject, the other as predicate’. And when we think further of the
grammatical sources of our distinction, we may recall another remark
of Ramsey’s: ‘Let us remind ourselves that the task on which we are
engaged is not merely one of English grammar; we are not
schoolchildren analysing sentences into subject, extension of the
subject, complement and so on’.
我们对着英语看看莱姆塞、拉姆奇、拉姆齐的真身是什么。 |
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