By Fred Landman
Indefinites and the kind of units explores a brand new concept of indefinite noun word interpretation and definiteness results. offers an advent to elements of the semantics of noun words, in addition to evaluating trade theories. Explores a brand new conception of indefinite noun word interpretation and definiteness results. Written accessibly through one of many world’s such a lot favourite formal semanticists. beneficial for college students and students in formal semantics in addition to the neighboring fields of syntax, pragmatics, and the philosophy of language.
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My causal chain for this name goes back to what I think is an initial baptism by Barbara Partee in her marginalia to a first draft of a paper by Godehard Link in the mid-1980s. I mention this, because the unpublished debate between Partee and Link forms the most direct inspiration for this chapter. In published work, versions or traces of the Adjectival Theory can be found in Bartsch (1973), Verkuyl (1981), Link (1987), Bowers (1991), and most explicitly in Bittner (1994), and in Krifka (1999); also related are van Geenhoven (1996), McNally (1998), and Dobrovie-Sorin and Laca (1996).
The simplest idea would be to assume that these phrases do in the adverbial domain what adjectival numericals, like three, do in the nominal domain. But I show, with some facts first discussed by Jenny Doetjes (Doetjes 1997), that such an account is too simple: the adverbial phrases introduce scopal relations that the nominal cases do not (meaning that the adverbial phrases are not simply intersective). In my analysis, the scopal effects come in through the semantics of time. I argue that time is not a normal noun, but in fact a classifier.
B. Some girl walked. c. Not more than three girls walked. 4 Negative noun phrases: no girl The Adjectival Theory predicts the wrong meaning for negative noun phrases like no girl. ¬∃x [GIRL(x) ∧ P(x)] = ATOM-GIRL The set of singular individuals which are not girls. ∃x[ATOM(x) ∧ ¬GIRL(x) ∧ P(x)] The set of properties that some non-girl has. 3 Whither the Adjectival Theory If the prospective for the Adjectival Theory is this bad, one can quite reasonably wonder why anyone would be attracted to this theory in the first place, and why with rather great regularity it keeps being proposed as an alternative to Montague–Partee.