106 "Nonsententialism" and the FLN* Peter Ludlow University of Michigan 1. Introduction Recently there has been a significant amount of literature on the topic of so-called “nonsentential assertion”, but it has not always been clear what it is and what the importance of the topic is supposed to be. 1 In this paper I try to get clear – as best I can – on what the question is all about, offer a possible way to precisify the question, and see whether we can make any headway in finding answers to the question once clarified. The initial form of the question seems simple enough. Some utterances look like full sentences – for example utterances of ‘Theatetus flies’, ‘My dog has fleas’, and ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ -- while other utterances seem to be, well, smaller. Examples include simple utterances of ‘Theatetus’, or ‘has fleas’, or ‘furiously’. It seems that the question is whether the simple utterances are sentences in disguise. The problem is that none of these utterances come with their linguistic forms on their sleeves. What our grade school English teacher might tell us about “incomplete sentences” is not based on reliable science, and deducing the actual form corresponding to these utterances is a highly theoretical empirical question that is at the outer edges of our understanding in current linguistic theory. We know that the sound wave produced in an utterance of ‘Theatetus’ is shorter than that produced in an utterance of ‘Theatetus flies’, but we can’t conclude much from that alone; we don’t know yet whether the language faculty (or, more plausibly, some related perceptual/articulatory system) pairs the phonetic form of an utterance of ‘Theatetus’ with a representation that is “sentential” – whatever ‘sentential’ might mean. This leads us directly to the first confusion. In theory we can detach the question of nonsententials from talk of utterances. Generative linguists typically take linguistics to be the study of the grammatical knowledge that we have and they further suppose it is a theory of linguistic competence, not performance. The actual role of this linguistic knowledge in the production and perception of utterances (much less written language) is far from well established. * An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference on ellipsis and nonsentential speech, held at The University of Western Ontario. I am grateful to Sam Epstein, Cati Fortin, Paul Pietroski, Ken Safir, and Rob Stainton for discussion. 1 For sample of recent work related to this topic see the papers in Eluguardo and Stainton (2005) as well as Bach (1994, 2000), Barton (1990, 1998), Carston (1988, 2000), Clapp (forthcoming), Fortin (forthcoming), Merchant (2004), Morgan (1973, 1989), Stainton (2005, 2006), and Stanley (2000).