Whether or not the particular view of generic sentences articulated above is correct, it is quite clear that the study of generic terms and the truth-conditions of generic sentences touches on the representation of other parts of the grammar, as well as on how the world around us is reflected in language. I would hope that the problems mentioned above will highlight the relevance of semantic analysis to other apparently distinct questions, and focus attention on the relevance of linguistic problems (...) to other already established areas of inquiry. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a novel treatment of generic sentences, which proceeds by means of different levels of analysis. According to this account, all generic sentences (I-generics and D-generics alike) are initially treated in a uniform manner, as involving higher-order predication (following the work of George Boolos, James Higginbotham and Barry Schein on plurals). Their non-uniform character, however, re-emerges at subsequent levels of analysis, when the higher-order predications of the first level are cashed out in terms of quantification over (...) individuals: this last step, I suggest, involves knowledge concerning the lexical meaning of the predicates in question. (shrink)

What I have attempted to show in the foregoing is that: (1) For any frequency adjective f, there is an element of meaning common to both the adverbial and the generic usage of f; this is a function f′ from propositions to truth-values such that f′(Φ)′ is true at an interval i iff Φ′ is true at subintervals of i distributed through i in a certain way. (2) In an adverbial use of f, f′ functions like the corresponding frequency adverb. (...) (3) In a generic use of f, f′ quantifies the times intervals which a specified object is realized by some stage. (4) In their adverbial usage, frequency adjectives are not regular attributive adjectives at the level at which interpretation takes place, but are perhaps determiners. And (5) in their generic usage, frequency adjectives are adjectives at the level at which interpretation takes place.More generally, I hope to have suggested something of the range of uses to which frequency is put in natural language. That we effortlessly grasp what is meants by Monday, the Columbus Dispatch, autumn, the Today Show, and so on, demonstrates our fluency in interpreting certain sequences of objects, events, or states of affairs as sequences of values of some function cycling on a time-axis. Much more must ultimately be told about the psychological and anthropological significance of frequency. (shrink)

We started from the fact that type theory, in the way it was implemented in IL, makes it costly to deal with nominalization processes. We have also argued that the type hierarchy as such doesn't play any real role in a grammar; the classification it provides for different semantic objects is already contained, in some sense, in the categorial structure of the grammar itself. So, on the basis of a theory of properties (Cocchiarella's HST*) we have tried to build a (...) language (IL*) whose syntax does not contain any explicit typing of expressions. Some of the consequences that this move brings about in the overall organization of the grammar can be summarized as follows:it allows for a simple treatment of infinitives, gerunds, factives and, in general, all those phenomena which might be analyzed as cases of nominalization;it provides a simpler and more constrained semantics than IL, since IL* doesn't go beyond second order, and its non-modal basis is axiomatizable;it suggests that the role of logical form in a theory of grammar could be that of a family of theories of semantic objects;it eliminates the extrinsic limitations of a type hierarchy on the choice of the system of syntactic categories.I think that it is interesting to notice how having an explicit semantic framework helps to provide a sense in which it is legitimate to regard the syntax of a language as ‘autonomous’. (shrink)

Quantificational arguments can take scope outside of temporal adjunct clauses, in an apparent violation of locality restrictions: the sentence few secretaries cried after each executive resigned allows the quantificational NP each executive to take scope above few secretaries. I show how this scope relation is the result of local operations: the adjunct clause is a temporal generalized quantifier which takes scope over the main clause (Pratt and Francez, Linguistic and Philosophy 24(2), 187–222. [2001]), and within the adjunct clause, the quantificational (...) argument takes scope above the implicit determiner which forms the temporal generalized quantifier. The paper explores various relations among quantificational arguments across clause boundaries, including temporal clauses that are modified internally by a temporal adverbial and temporal clauses with embedded sentential complements. (shrink)