De Dicto Reading Via Semantic Incorporation

Veerle van Geenhoven
Max Planck Institut for Psicolinguistik
vevageen@mpi.nl

Louise McNally
Universitad Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
mcnally@lancelot.upf.es

In this paper we offer support for Zimmermann's (1993) proposal that intensional verbs such as "look for" take properties as their internal arguments. More interestingly, we show that it is a natural consequence of what we argue to be an independently identifiable semantic phenomenon which van Geenhoven (1996) calls "semantic incorporation" (SI). SI builds on the hypothesis that verbs are systematically able to combine with nominal expressions of different semantic types. Crucially, in SI the verb combines with a property-type nominal. When SI takes places with extensional verbs such as "buy", the verb's lexical entailments guarantee the existence of entities described by the object NP or incorporated nominal, just as Carlson's 1977 analysis of stage level predicates entailed existential readings for bare plurals. However, when intensional verbs undergo SI they fail to entail the existence of any entity corresponding to the second participant in the intensional relation. For example, we analyze the extensional and intensional counterparts of the verb "look for" as in (1a,b), respectively:

(1)

(a) L x[look for(x,y)] ('L'='lambda') (b) LP x[look for(x,P)]

We argue that SI improves upon Zimmermann's analysis (and those which treat the verb's second argument as an intensional quantifier following Montague 1974) among other things in correctly predicting that sentences such as (2a,b) have only de dicto readings.

(2a)

Marta is looking for toys.

(2b)

Vittu cykili-sar-siur -p -u -q. [W. Greenlandic] V.ABS bike-FUT-look.for-IND-[-tr]-3SG "Vittus is looking for a bike."

Finally, we answer the criticisms of the property analysis of intensional verbs raised by Dowty et al. 1981 and Moltmann 1995.

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