Intensional Verbs Research Articles

Sainsbury on Thinking about an Object

R.M. Sainsbury’s account of reference has many compelling and attractive features. But it has the undesirable consequence that sentences of the form “x is thinking about y” can never be true when y is replaced by a non-referring term. Of the two obvious ways to deal with this problem within Sainsbury’s framework, I reject one (the analysis of thinking about as a propositional attitude) and endorse the other(treating “thinks about” as akin to an intensional transitive verb). This endorsement is also within the spirit of Sainsbury’s account of reference.

Ja ždu avtobus: i verbi intensionali in russo tra norma e uso

The aim of this paper is to verify if the referential ambiguity induced by intensional verbs (xotet’, želat’, trebovat’, prosit’, ždat’, iskat’, bojat’sja …) can be resolved in Russian by grammatical means, assigning accusative case to [+ specific] objects and genitive case to [- specific] objects (Partee 2005), or accusative case to [± specific] objects and genitive case [- specific] objects (Kagan 2005). This hypothesis is verified on the basis of empirical data, by analizing a corpus of 476 concrete occurrences of the VP ždat’ avtobus.

Bodyguards under Cover: the Status of Individual Concepts

No abstract.

Austinian Truth, Attitudes and Type Theory

This paper is part of a broader project whose aim is to present a coherent unified approach to natural language dialogue semantics using tools from type theory. Here we explore aspects of our approach which relate to situation theory and situation semantics. We first point out a relationship between type theory and the Austinian notion of truth. We then consider how records in type theory might be used to represent situations and how dependent record types can be used to model constraints on situations. We then sketch treatments of attitude phenomena for which Barwise and Perry proposed situation semantic analyses (perception complements, belief, the Pierre puzzle) as well as two other intensional phenomena (intensional verbs and intentional identity). Finally we give a characterisation of the type theory used and a small illustrative fragment of English.

Intensional Noun Phrases with know and be

Seguint Romero (2003), aquest treball desenvolupa una anàlisi unificada de dos tipus de Sintagmes Nominals: els sintagmes nominals de preguntes velades amb know i els subjectes nominals d’oracions especificatives amb be. S’argumenta que tant el know epistèmic com el be especificatiu són verbs intensionals que necessiten un argument semàntic intensional. També s’argumenta que aquest argument semàntic té, en tots dos casos, naturalesa proposicional. Per donar suport a aques- tes conclusions es presenten dades interlingüístiques referents a la pronominalització, la coordi- nació i els anomenats efectes de «matching» en oracions relatives lliures.

Ambiguity and Belief

This paper is concerned with the notion of ambiguity—or what I shall refer to more generally as homonymy—and its bearing upon various familiar puzzles about intensional contexts. It would hardly of course be a novel claim that the unravelling of such puzzles may well involve recourse to something like ambiguity. After all, Frege, who bequeathed to us one of the most enduring of the puzzles, proposed as part of his solution an analysis of intensional contexts according to which all expressions change their sense when embedded in such contexts. (Indeed they change their sense with each embedding.) And many contemporary philosophers who have discussed the puzzles, while not perhaps endorsing Frege's own somewhat extreme view, nevertheless take ambiguities in the contained sentences to be the key to the puzzles. In this paper, however, I wish to follow those who take the crucial source of homonymy, at least in the most difficult of the puzzles, to lie primarily not in the embedded sentences, but rather in the intensional verbs that embed them. I begin with a brief examination of certain aspects of ambiguity and homonymy.

Weak readings of indefinites: type-shifting and closure

The starting point of our investigation is the assumption that weak indefinite NPs have a well-formed denotation of type (e,t). This paper explores the consequences of this flexible type-theoretic approach at the compositional level. Some expressions (e.g., predicative be) select for arguments of type (e,t). The combination of predicative NPs with stage-level predicates and other expressions which do not necessarily select for arguments of type (e, t) creates a type mismatch which can be solved by defining modes of composition other than function application. These closure operations are argued to be lexicalized in light verbs like have and intensional verbs like seek. They are grammaticalized in the existential there construction.

Indefinites between Predication and Reference

No abstract.

In the Cause of Subjunctive

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Intensional Verbs and Quantifiers

This paper discusses the semantics of intensional NP-taking verbs such as need, want, recognize, and hire. It proposes several new linguistic criteria for intensionality besides the traditional ones of failure of existential quantification and substitutivity, and it defends two different semantic analyses for different intensional verbs. For the majority of verbs, the paper argues for a partialized version of the intensional quantifier analysis originally proposed by Montague, but for a single class of verbs, verbs of comparison, it adopts the property analysis recently proposed as a general analysis of intensional verb constructions by Zimmermann (1992). The paper also includes a systematic classification of intensional verbs according to the type of lexical meaning they involve.

Quantifiers, Anaphora, and Intensionality

The relationship between Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) functional structures (f-structures) for sentences and their semantic interpretations can be formalized in linear logic in a way that correctly explains the observed interactions between quantifier scope ambiguity, bound anaphora and intensionality. Our linear-logic formalization of the compositional properties of quantifying expressions in natural language obviates the need for special mechanisms, such as Cooper storage, in representing the scoping possibilities of quantifying expressions. Instead, the semantic contribution of a quantifier is recorded as a linear-logic formula whose use in a proof will establish the scope of the quantifier. Different proofs can lead to different scopes. In each complete proof, the properties of linear logic ensure that quantifiers are properly scoped. The interactions between quantified NPs and intensional verbs such as ’’seek‘‘ are also accounted for in this deductive setting. A single specification in linear logic of the argument requirements of intensional verbs is sufficient to derive the correct reading predictions for intensional-verb clauses both with nonquantified and with quantified direct objects. In particular, both de dicto and de re readings are derived for quantified objects. The effects of type-raising or quantifying-in rules in other frameworks just follow here as linear-logic theorems. While our approach resembles current categorial approaches in important ways (Moortgat, 1988, 1992a; Carpenter, 1993; Morrill, 1994) it differs from them in allowing the greater compositional flexibility of categorial semantics (van Benthem, 1991) while maintaining a precise connection to syntax. As a result, we are able to provide derivations for certain readings of sentences with intensional verbs and complex direct objects whose derivation in purely categorial accounts of the syntax-semantics interface appears to require otherwise unnecessary semantic decompositions of lexical entries.

Présupposition et intension

Pierre-Yves Raccah: Presupposition and Intension. ln this paper, I argue for the adequacy of formal approaches to the description of meaning, even in cases of expressions conveying conventionaI implicature. By formal approaches, I mean frameworks intended to account for sentence meaning, and meeting the conditions of compositionnality, autonomy towards knowledge and beliefs about the world, and modularity. I first show that presupposition, instead of being considered as a relation between a sentence (or an utterance) and another sentence (or, at best, a proposition), should rather be seen as a relation between a sentence and a meaning. Besides avoiding the presupposition-entailment paradox, this position is shown to allow a compositionnal treatment of presupposition, using, for instance, Karttunen and Peters' tools. 1 then give the bases of a «representation al semantics», that aims at freeing semantic description from both speakers» intentions and truth conditions. 1 conclude with a couple of examples of semantic analyses for sentences containing intensional verbs such as «savoir» or «espérer», and show how these analyses fulfill the task they were ascribed. Some questions are left open as to the generalization of this treatment to other intensional cases, and as to the exact shape meaning representations should have.