Abstract of
"The Semantics of Intensionalization"
Abstract of
"The Semantics of Intensionalization"
Gilad Ben-Avi
and
Yoad Winter
Proceedings of New Directions in Type-theoretical Grammar 2007
pdf
This paper introduces a procedure that takes a simple version
of extensional semantics and generates from it an equivalent
possible world
semantics that is suitable for treating intensional phenomena in
natural language. This process of intensionalization allows to treat
intensional
phenomena as stemming exclusively from the lexical meaning of
words like believe, need or fake. We illustrate the proposed
intensionalization
technique using an extensional toy fragment. This fragment is used
to show that independently motivated extensional mechanisms for scope
shifting and verb-object composition, once properly intensionalized,
are
strictly speaking responsible for certain intensional effects,
including de
dicto/de re ambiguities and coordinations containing intensional
transitive
verbs. While such extensional-intensional relations have often been
assumed in the literature, the present paper offers a formal sense for
this
claim, facilitating the dissociation between extensional semantics and
intensional semantics.
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