Hybrid Expressions

摘要

The paper discusses the idea of hybrid names. First, the three theories of hybrid names (according to Kuenne, Kripke and Textor) are briefly discussed and compared. Second, the paper briefly discusses some problems that the theories face. Third, an alternative hybrid view is outlined. According to that view, utterances are contextually perduring objects. It is argued that in order to determine the contextual distribution of a particular utterance, one has to take into account the admissible distributions of contextual parameters, their potential referents and the speaker's referential intentions. Finally, the merits of the view are briefly discussed. Two of the most important are: the analysis of cases of multiple occurrences of indexicals and demonstratives, and the solution to the so-called problem of missing demonstrations.