Truthmaker Semantics and Natural Language Semantics

Abstract

Truthmaker semantics is a non-classical logical framework that has recently garnered significant interest in philosophy, logic, and natural language semantics. It redefines the propositional connectives and gives rise to more fine-grained entailment relations than classical logic. In its model theory, truth is not determined with respect to possible worlds, but with respect to truthmakers, such as states or events. Unlike possible worlds, these truthmakers may be partial; they may be either coherent or incoherent; and they are understood to be exactly or wholly relevant to the truth of the sentences they verify. Truthmaker semantics generalises collective, fusion-based theories of conjunction; alternative-based theories of disjunction; and nonstandard negation semantics. This article provides a gentle introduction to truthmaker semantics aimed at linguists; describes applications to various natural language phenomena such as imperatives, ignorance implicatures, and negative events; and discusses its similarities and differences to related frameworks such as event semantics, situation semantics, alternative semantics, and inquisitive semantics.