Thursday, May 05, 2005

Pragmatics or Syntax????

So in my philosophy of language seminar today, we all stayed 50 minutes after class discussing the syntactic features of the following utterances. These are the cases that make me love philosophy of language.

(1) The chicken cooked.
(2) The chicken overcooked.
(3) My foot is on fire.
(4) My foot is in the fire.

So what are the differences between (1) & (2)? What do you think (1) & (2) mean when you utter them? What are the differences between (3) & (4)?

We were discussing whether the features of the utterances are bases ypon syntax, or usage. There seems to be something that I think is a syntactic element in the above utterances, but I don't know what it is...

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