Questions: Semantic Underdetermination and Context

Question 1

Someone utters 'Everyone left.' Philosophers argue that interpreting this requires contextual domain restriction. This is an example of:

• A. Lexical ambiguity — 'everyone' has two distinct dictionary meanings: universal and restricted
• B. Gricean implicature — 'everyone' literally means every person in the universe, but we pragmatically infer a smaller domain
• C. Semantic underdetermination — the sentence leaves a domain variable unsaturated, so it does not express a determinate proposition without contextual restriction of the quantifier's domain
• D. Pragmatic enrichment that goes beyond the literal meaning without affecting truth conditions

Answer: (C)

This is semantic underdetermination, not lexical ambiguity (which involves a single word having two dictionary entries) or implicature (which is communicated meaning beyond the literal). The sentence 'Everyone left' has a unique syntactic parse and no ambiguous words, yet it fails to express a complete, evaluable proposition: 'everyone in the universe left' is clearly not what's meant, and the grammar does not specify which domain of quantification is operative. Context must supply the restriction (e.g., 'everyone at the party'). This is not communicated beyond the literal — it is a gap in the literal content itself. The truth conditions of the sentence are incomplete without this contextual input.

Question 2

How does semantic underdetermination differ from syntactic ambiguity?

• A. Syntactic ambiguity occurs only in written language; underdetermination only in spoken language
• B. Syntactic ambiguity involves a sentence having multiple grammatical parsings, each yielding a different meaning; semantic underdetermination involves a grammatically unambiguous sentence that still fails to express a complete proposition without contextual input
• C. They are the same phenomenon analyzed at different levels of linguistic description
• D. Semantic underdetermination applies only to indexical expressions like 'I' and 'here'; syntactic ambiguity applies to all sentences

Answer: (B)

'Flying planes can be dangerous' is syntactically ambiguous — it has two parses (flying planes = planes that fly, or flying planes = the act of flying them). Each parse yields a complete, truth-evaluable proposition. Semantic underdetermination is different: 'It is raining' is syntactically unambiguous (one parse), but the sentence underdetermines a full proposition because no location is specified. We cannot even ask whether the sentence is true or false until context fills in where. The grammar is fully specified; what's missing is a parameter the grammar requires but does not supply.

Question 3

A sentence can be grammatically complete and syntactically unambiguous while still failing to express a complete, truth-evaluable proposition without contextual supplementation.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: True

This is precisely the core claim of semantic underdetermination. 'It is raining,' 'Steel is stronger than plastic,' 'I've had enough,' and 'Everyone left' are all grammatically complete and syntactically unambiguous sentences. Yet each fails to express a determinate proposition without contextual input: rain where? Stronger how and under what conditions? Enough of what? Everyone in what domain? Context must supply content that completes the logical form — and this supplementation is required for truth-conditional evaluation, not merely for pragmatic interpretation.

Question 4

Semantic minimalism holds that most ordinary sentences require substantial pragmatic input from context to determine their literal, truth-conditional content.

• T. True
• F. False

Answer: False

Semantic minimalism holds the opposite: sentences have minimal, context-independent truth conditions determined by grammar and lexicon alone, and pragmatic context affects only what is communicated beyond the literal meaning. It is *contextualism* that holds context shapes not just implicature but the literal truth-conditional content of ordinary sentences. The debate between minimalism and contextualism is precisely about whether phenomena like 'It is raining' show that context enters into literal meaning (contextualism) or whether the sentence already has complete (if very minimal) truth conditions that context merely enriches conversationally (minimalism).

Question 5

Why does 'It is raining' fail to express a complete proposition without context, and how is this different from mere Gricean implicature?

Model answer: The sentence 'It is raining' has no explicit location or time argument, yet raining is always raining *somewhere*. The proposition 'it is raining somewhere at some time' is trivially true and not what the sentence communicates. To get a truth-evaluable proposition — one that could actually be true or false in a way that matters — context must supply at least a location: 'it is raining here, now.' This contextual input completes the logical form of the sentence, not just what the speaker communicates by it. Gricean implicature is different: in implicature, the sentence already has complete literal truth conditions, and pragmatic inference adds communicated meaning *beyond* those conditions. Here, the problem is prior: the sentence cannot even be evaluated for truth before context fills the gap. The context is determining literal content, not just conversational content above and beyond it.