O “BEZ”

The paper deals with the word “without” and its role in those kinds of collocations in which it has a meaning-carrying function. It is assumed that the meaning of “without” in the kinds of collocations under scrutiny is context independent in that it can be explicated by a single scheme: For every ξ1, ξ2, …, ξn holds, that Π(ξ1, ξ2, …, ξn) if not Θ(ξ1, ξ2, …, ξn) where Π, Θ are propositions or propositional functions (predicates) and ξ1, ξ2, …, ξn are relevant variables, whose range is determined by that following after the word “without”. The scheme varies with the variable type to which “without” is applied purely as a certain kind of operator. The concatenations “without + expression” are, typically, equivalent to more prolix “without”-free collocations; thus “without” is a suitable device for text comprehension.