Abstract

Augustine famously claims every word is a name. Some readers take Augustine to thereby maintain a purely referentialist semantic account according to which every word is a referential expression whose meaning is its extension. Other readers think that Augustine is no referentialist and is merely claiming that every word has some meaning. In this paper, I clarify Augustine’s arguments to the effect that every word is a name and argue that ‘every word is a name’ amounts to the claim that for any word, there exist tokens of that word which are autonymous nouns. Augustine takes this to be the result of universal lexical ambiguity or equivocity (that is, the fact that every word has more than one literal meaning) and I clarify how Augustine’s account of metalinguistic discourse, which is one of the most detailed to have survived from antiquity, differs from some ancient and modern theories.

中文翻译：

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每个词都是一个名字：奥古斯丁的自主性和引语

摘要

奥古斯丁（Augustine）有句名言，每个词都是一个名字。一些读者认为奥古斯丁由此维持了一种纯粹指称主义的语义解释，根据这种解释，每个词都是指称表达，其含义是其外延。其他读者认为奥古斯丁不是指称主义者，只是声称每个词都有一定的含义。在这篇论文中，我澄清了奥古斯丁的论点，即每个词都是一个名字，并认为“每个词都是一个名字”相当于声称对于任何词，都存在该词的标记，这些标记是自主名词。奥古斯丁认为这是普遍词汇歧义或模棱两可的结果（也就是说，每个词都有多个字面意义），我澄清奥古斯丁对元语言话语的描述是如何幸存下来的最详细的话语之一古代，