Recent Developments in Monster-Oriented Semantics

Abstract

    In his “Demonstratives”, David Kaplan discussed certain nonintensional operators called monsters. The operators, unlike ordinary ones, change the reference of indexicals by shifting the parameter of context. Although Kaplan denied monsters at least in English on the ground of both the doctrine of direct reference and the principle of compositionality, many monstrous phenomena of singular terms have been confirmed by some semanticists lately, which seems to urge Kaplanian semantics to be revised. In this survey article, we offer a survey of recent developments in the semantics of indexicals, variables, and proper names by focusing on monsters, and give some suggestions about direct reference, monsters, and compositionality.