Formatives

Abstract

An answer to the question of ‘sentential unity’ (What makes a sentence a single linguistic unit rather than just a string of words?) is one of the goals of any theory of logical syntax. A ‘Fregean’ theory claims that a sentence is a function (unsaturated expression, containing gaps) whose gaps are filled with either arguments (saturated, gap-less) or other functions which have already been saturated. A ‘Leibnizian’ theory construes a sentence as a syntactically complex subject (quantified term) plus a syntactically complex predicate (qualified term). Subjects and predicates just naturally fit one another to form sentences. An ‘Aristotelian’ theory takes a sentence to consist of a pair of terms connected by a binary formative expression (functor), whose only role is to connect terms to form more complex expressions (e.g., sentences). After an examination of the formal nature of such functors, it is argued that this third sort of theory not only answers better the question of sentential unity, but it also provides a better account of the nature of logical constants in general. © 1989 by the University of Notre Dame. All rights reserved.