A related topic of general interest is the phenomenon of informational independence in natural languages.
However, even when informational independence can be syntactically indicated, the indicators are different from case to case.
As Hintikka (1990) has stressed, informational independence is a cross-categorical phenomenon: it can occur in connection with expressions of widely different grammatical categories.
Hintikka and Sandu (1989) propose several examples from English calculated to show that there is an abundance of instances of informational independence in natural languages.
Hintikka and Sandu (1989) took up the task of formulating an explicit unified formal treatment for the different varieties of informational independence in natural language semantics.
The latter construal complies with the way informational independence is understood in game theory, while the former led to some confused examples in Hintikka and Sandu's paper (examples about neg-raising, pp. 577 580, see also Hintikka 1990, Sandu 1993).
The suggested consequences of these logics for philosophical issues such as the existence of a self-applied truth-predicate, the logicist program, the philosophical relevance of axiomatic set theory, and informational independence in natural languages have been covered as well.
Hintikka and Sandu suggested that informational independence plays a key role in increasing the expressive power of natural languages.[91] In GTS as developed for English in Hintikka & Kulas (1983 , 1985, game rules are associated with a great variety of linguistic expressions (cf. Subsect. 2.1).
By reference to Hintikka's theory of the semantics of questions (Hintikka 1976b), Carlson and ter Meulen (1979) called attention to wh-questions formed out of suitable sentences with a branching quantifier reading, and argued that the desideratum of such a question will involve informational independence of the usual quantifiers from the intensional know-construction.
In Hintikka & Sandu (1989: 575 576) it is said that informational independence is a relation between applications of game rules, but also that it is a relation that a move prompted by an expression in a semantic game bears to a number of earlier moves prompted by further expressions (cf. also Hintikka & Sandu 1997: 367).
As a rule, informational independence is not indicated syntactically in English.[93] Methodological consequences of this fact are discussed in Hintikka (1990), where he tentatively puts forward the Syntactic Silence Thesis, according to which sufficiently radical cross-categorical phenomena are not likely to be marked syntactically in natural languages.
