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Montague’s classic article “The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English” (PTQ, 1973) treated all NP occurrences as quantificational. Partee’s article “Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type-Shifting Principles” (1987) reconciles PTQ’s uniform quantificational strategy with the older distinction between three NP types: entities, predicates and quantifiers. On top of this distinction, Partee introduces operators that allow shifting the denotation of an NP to a different type than the one it is initially assigned. Using these type-shifters, one and the same NP may receive each of the three interpretations. In addition to this synthesis of previous approaches, Partee’s article contains a rather elaborate analysis of predicative NPs, as well as insightful hints about the treatment of definite NPs, nominalization phenomena, plural, mass and generic NPs, and the mathematical principles underlying type-shifting. At a more global level, Partee’s article marks a methodological transition in formal semantics, highlighting general principles that are relevant to different languages and to different linguistic frameworks, rather than technicalities of artificial language fragments. This general account and the new ways it opened for semantic theory, together with the paper’s lucid and friendly style, have made “Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type-Shifting Principles” one of the modern classics in formal semantics. After some necessary background on NPs in PTQ, this review covers the main innovations in Partee’s article, and comments on the work and its influence.

The nature of moral judgments, and, more specifically, the ques0on of how they relate, on the one hand, to objec0ve reality and, on the other, to subjec0ve experience, are issues that have been central to metaethics from its very beginnings. While these complex and challenging issues have been debated by analy0c philosophers for over a century, it is only rela0vely recently that more interdisciplinary and empirically-oriented approaches to such issues have begun to see light. The present chapter aims to make a contribu0on of that kind. We will present the results of an empirical-specifically, corpus linguis0c-study that offers evidence that moral predicates exhibit hallmarks of subjec0vity at the linguis0c level, but also, that they differ significantly from paradigma0cally subjec0ve predicates.

Focusing on the case of deverbal gradable adjectives such as acquainted, we show that the selective behavior of degree modifiers such as very and well provides an important prove on the semantic typology of adjectives. Specifically, we demonstrate that the distribution of degree modifiers is closely tied to the scalar structure of the adjectives they modify, and that scale structure also determines one of the core semantic properties of gradable adjectives: the nature of the «standard values» according to which sentences involving adjectival predications are judged to be true. In addition, we show that in the case of deverbal gradable adjectives, scalar structure can be inferred from the aspectual properties of the source verbs, providing a basis for predicting which degree modifiers will be acceptable with which participles. Centrant-nos en el cas dels adjectius deverbals graduables de l'anglès, com ara acquainted, mostrem que el comportament selectiu de modificadors de gradació com per exemple very i well constitueix una prova important per a la tipologia semàntica dels adjectius. Concretament, demostrem que la distribució dels modificadors de grau està estretament relacionada amb l'estructura escalar dels adjectius que modifiquen i que aquesta estructura escalar també determina una de les propietats semàntiques centrals dels adjectius graduables: la naturalesa dels «valors estàndars» d'acord amb la qual les oracions que contenen predicacions adjectivals es jutgen com a veritables. A més, mostrem que, en el cas dels adjectius deverbals graduables, l'estructura escalar pot inferir-se de les propietats aspectuals dels verbs originals, la qual cosa permet de predir quins modificadors de grau seran acceptables amb quins participis.

In this paper we argue that reflexive psychological verbs in Spanish (SRPVs), such as aburrirse ‘bore-REFL’ constitute a special subclass of stative predicate which we term BOUNDED STATE PREDICATES. Bounded state predicates entail that the onset of the state they denote falls within the reference time for the predicate. The analysis not only accounts for subtle differences between SRPVs and related estar+participle expressions but also lays the groundwork for explaining the otherwise puzzling fact that SRPVs are translated into English with phrases involving get in some cases and be in others., Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, Vol 9 (2005): Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 9