Natural Language and Its Ontology
Friederike Moltmann
October 2017 

Natural language reflects its own ontology, an ontology that may differ from the ontology a philosopher may be willing to accept or even a non-philosopher when thinking about what there is, and of course it may differ from the ontology of what there really is. This paper gives a characterization of the ontology implicit in natural language and the entities it involves, situates natural language ontology within metaphysics, discusses what sorts of data may be considered reflective of the ontology of natural language, and addresses Chomsky's dismissal of externalist semantics.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/003690 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in A. Goldman/B. McLaughlin (eds): Metaphysics and Cognitive Science, Oxford University Press 2018
keywords:	ontology, natural language, reference, descriptive metaphysics, variable objects, tropes, kinds, existence, chomsky, fine, semantics
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