The Semantics of Adverbial Inference


Graham White, . 15 juin 2007 10:30 limd
Abstract:

Adverbial inferences, such as that from "he ran quickly" to "he ran", have raised serious problems for the semantics of natural language. Traditionally -- at any rate since Davidson's work -- these inferences have been handled with a first-order formalisation using individual events. This is not without problems: there is, for example, very little consensus about conditions of identity for events. I propose an alternative, higher order semantics, using two categories, and I will discuss its implications for the semantics of such sentences.