THE LOGICAL STATUS OF INDEXICAL SENTENCES.

The report contains the introduction and chapter summaries of a doctoral thesis that examines the linguistic phenomenon of the indexicality of expressions in natural languages. The following relations between syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic linguistic theories are assumed a syntactic theory assigns syntactic structures to strings of characters a semantic theory assigns semantic structures to ordered pairs consisting of strings and syntactic structures of these strings and a pragmatic theory assigns pragmatic structures to ordered triplets consisting of strings, syntactic structures of these strings, and semantic structures of these strings with these syntactic structures. A distinction is made between linguistic phenomena and non-linguistic phenomena that have a linguistic aspect. A number of meta-languages syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic are developed for the investigation of indexicality i.e., context dependency, and relevant concepts are introduced and explored. The nature of pragmatic languages is examined from semiotic, logical, and philosophic points of view. It is shown that every sentence in most if not all natural languages is indexical. The main reasons for indexicality are occurrences of diectic expressions, of quantificational expressions, and of theoretical expressions. The indexicality of sentences cannot be removed by linguistic clarifications. Author