In these essays the minimalist approach to linguistic theory is formulated and progressively developed.

Chapter. 1. Logical. Form. as. a. Level. of. Linguistic. Representation. What is the relation of a sentence's syntactic form to its logical form? This issue has been of central concern in modern inquiry into the semantic properties of natural ...

It has been maintained that we need not tolerate such entities as pains, events, tasks, and obligations. They are indeed not required in connection with sentences like ‘Jones has a pain’, ‘the event of the sun’s rising occurred at eight’, ‘Jones performed at eight the task of lifting a stone’, or ‘Jones has the obligation to give Smith a horse’, which can be paraphrased without reference to the entities in question—for instance, in the case of the second example, as ‘the (...) sun rose at eight’. (shrink)

This paper discusses the semantics of intensional transitive verbs such as 'need', 'want','recognize', 'find', and 'hire'. It proposes new linguistic criteria for intensionality and defends two semantic analyses for two different classes of intensional verbs. The paper also includes a systematic classification of intensional verbs according to the type of lexical meaning they involve.

This paper is about the semantic analysis of referentially opaque verbs like seek and owe that give rise to nonspecific readings. It is argued that Montague's categorization (based on earlier work by Quine) of opaque verbs as properties of quantifiers runs into two serious difficulties: the first problem is that it does not work with opaque verbs like resemble that resist any lexical decomposition of the seek ap try to find kind; the second one is that it wrongly predicts de (...) dicto (i.e. narrow scope) readings due to quantified noun phrases in the object positions of such verbs. It is shown that both difficulties can be overcome by an analysis of opaque verbs as operating on properties. This is a strongly modified version of a paper entitled lsquoDo We Bear Attitudes towards Quantifiers?rsquo that I have presented at conferences in Gosen (Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft), Ithaca (SALT I), and Konstanz (Lexikon). I owe a special debt to Hans Kamp and Arnim von Stechow for shaping my views on the subject of this paper during the past ten years or so. Comments from and discussions with the following friends and colleagues have also led to considerable improvements: Heinrich Beck, Steve Berman, David Dowty, Veerle van Geenhoven, Fritz Hamm, Irene Heim, Wolfgang Klein, Angelika Kratzer, Michael Morreau, Barbara Partee, Mats Rooth, Roger Schwarzschild, Wolfgang Sternefeld, Emil Weydert, Henk Zeevat, and three referees. (shrink)

A central theme of this collection is that the philosophy of language, at least a core portion of it, has matured to the point where it is now being spun off ...

This paper is about the cluster of issues that orbit a well-known thesis of Quine’s, as it applies to attitude ascriptions.

Along the way, Zero Syntax also examines issues of broad significance to current theoretical linguistic research in syntax and lexical semantics.Zero Syntax ...

This thesis is divided into two parts. Part I consists of a discussion of how a Davidsonian semantic theory might be enriched by some of the resources of modern linguistic theory. Two chapters are found in this part of the dissertation. Chapter 1 sets up the general theoretical framework, discussing the Davidsonian program and showing how the task of semantic theory is to define a truth predicate off of the LF representations of natural language sentences. Chapter 2 sketches the shape (...) that such a formal truth predicate might take. Special attention is given to natural language quantification and to attributive modifiers. ;Part II of the thesis focuses on a problem that has taken up much attention from those doing semantics within the model-theoretic tradition, namely the problem of the attitudes. Much of their work has proceeded under the assumption that such problems can only be treated in a semantic theory endowed with a fairly rich model theory and a possible world ontology. Part II of this thesis may be regarded as an attempt not so much to show an error in the model-theoretic approach, but merely to show that there is an alternative. ;We focus only on a certain class of attitude reports in this thesis, namely "referential attitude reports". These are distinguished from propositional attitudes, in that there is no "that-clause" signaling the intensional environment. Typical examples of referential attitudes include sentences like 'John seeks a donkey' and 'Bill is hoping for the fastest bus'. ;Two difficulties arise for any treatment of referential attitudes. First, there is the problem of how one is to get what is sometimes called the "non-specific" or "attributive" reading. It is this problem that takes up our attention in chapter 3. The second problem concerns the "specific" readings of referential attitude reports, particularly when it seems that the object of intention is non-existent . This problem is addressed in chapter 4. (shrink)