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)

Willard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, "Language is asocial art.

This dissertation provides a model-theoretic semantics for English sentences atttributing a property or action to a group of objects, either collectively or distributively. It is shown that certain adverbial expressions select for collective predicates; therefore collective and distibutive predicates must be distinguishable. This finding is problematic for recent accounts of distributive predicates which analyze such predicates as taking group-level arguments, and hence as not distinguishable from collective predicates. ;A group-level treatment of distributives is possible, however, if predicate denotations are relativized (...) to a set of events for which a part/whole relation is defined. An event in which a group performs an action distributively will have subevents in which each of the group's members perform the same action; an event in which the group performs the action collectively will not. ;This analysis also makes possible an account of the fact that adverbials expressing collective action commonly have an additional use expressing spatial proximity, both in English and cross-linguistically. . A spatial "trace" function on the set of events allows formal definitions for the spatial uses of such adverbials to exactly parallel the definitions for the collectivizing uses. ;The dissertation also provides arguments for a set-theoretic model for plurality, in which the group membership relation is distinct from the subgroup relation. ;Certain quantifiers are shown sensitive to distinction between different sorts of group-level event. To accommodate this fact, it is suggested that verbal denotations provide, for each event, both an "inclusion set" and an "exclusion set"--corresponding roughly to positive and negative denotations. If the inclusion and exclusion sets are allowed under certain circumstances not to complement each other, correct results obtain. ;The splitting of verbal denotations into inclusion and exclusion sets also allows the solution of certain problems in previous accounts of the semantics of subject-verb agreement for number. The dissertation closes with a defense of the hypothesis that agreement is conditioned primarily by the semantics. (shrink)

This paper has two parts. In part I, I review two older accounts of the logical forms of modifiers, and suggest that they may be combined with each other so as to yield a theory that is better than either of its parts taken singly. Part of this theory involves the idea that certain sentences refer to events, states, or processes; Part II of this paper shows how to use this idea to account for tenses and temporal adverbials, and offers (...) a new account of ordinary language quantification. (shrink)

This paper has two parts. In part I, I review two older accounts of the logical forms of modifiers, and suggest that they may be combined with each other so as to yield a theory that is better than either of its parts taken singly. Part of this theory involves the idea that certain sentences refer to events, states, or processes; Part II of this paper shows how to use this idea to account for tenses and temporal adverbials, and offers (...) a new account of ordinary language quantification. (shrink)