Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This paper analyzes complex attitude predicates such as make the claim that S. The proposal is couched in the the idea that propositional attitudes are built from content-bearing individuals (e.g. Moulton 2009; Moltmann 2020). I argue that the singular definite in this construction refers to a definite kind in the sense of Dayal 2004, specifying the type of result rather than the result itself. This immediately explains a range of phenomena including non-anaphoricity, no instantiation in negative contexts, and apparent non-uniqueness in quantified contexts. A compositional analysis is developed, building up from the individual parts, in which this constructions takes a definite kind argument and denotes the creation of its instances.
DOI: 10.3765/jyswc178
Author: Kalle Müller
Institution: Université Côte d'Azur
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung
OpenAlex ID: W4409510114