Locations and binding
Herman Cappelen, John T. Hawthorne · Analysis · 2007
It is natural to think that the relationship between ‘to rain’ and the location of rain is different from the relationship between ‘to dance’ and the location of dancing. Utterances of (1) are typically interpreted as, in some sense, being abouta location in which it rains. (2) is, typically, not interpreted as being about a location in which the dancing takes place. ... A number of theories have been proposed to explain the difference. Some think that the so-called ‘binding argument’ shows that there’s a syntactically realized argument place for location in the logical form of ‘rain’, but not for ‘dance’ (see Stanley 2000). Others, while demurring from such syntactic hypotheses, agree that the meaning of the verb ‘rain’ somehow requires a location to figure in propositions expressed by sentences in which that verb occurs, while the meaning of the verb ‘dance’ imposes no such requirement (for one version of this view, see Taylor 2001). Contrary to both these views, we’ll argue for (a)–(d)