Semantics without Existential Quantifiers
Semantics without Existential Quantifiers
Aside from its benefits to semantics, the inclusion of the generalized form of Skolem terms avoids many paradoxes that arise when natural language quantifiers are represented by traditional existential quantifiers, including the seemingly anomalous scope of indefinites in donkey sentences. Some other operators besides quantifiers induce dependency in elements that are within their scope, such as negation, intensional verbs such as want and seek, modal verbs like might and will, and the conditional, if...then... This chapter focuses on semantics without existential quantifiers, along with intensionality, definites and indefinites, pronouns, the distributivity of quantifiers, the maximal participancy of plurals, negation, polarity, and monotone entailment.
Keywords: semantics, existential quantifiers, negation, intensionality, definites, indefinites, pronouns, plurals, polarity, monotone entailment
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
