Syntactic Details

In Chapter 2 the author proposed that by ‘grey’ in ‘The patch looks grey to you’ we mean two things—the property of being grey, and a certain way of looking (which are distinct things). In this chapter the author addresses the concern that this is not possible—that it is not possible to mean two distinct things by ‘grey’ with the one use. The author does two things: (a) attempts to make it more plausible that it is indeed possible; and (b) offers an alternative fallback account of how we use ‘grey’, one that does not rely upon an ability to mean two distinct things by it (the alternative account posits the existence of aphonic material in the sentence).