Perspective on individuals

Abstract

Davidson’s proposal that action verbs contain a hidden event argument, later refined by Parsons and others, has provided a powerful framework for understanding the logical form of sentences, in particular those involving adverbial modification. In this paper, we parallel this approach in the nominal domain by introducing the notion of perspectives, which function analogously to events. Our goal is to develop a logical account of adnominal modification that mirrors the insights of event semantics.We propose a compositional framework in which adjectives and undetermined noun phrases are interpreted as sets of perspectives rather than sets of individuals or modifiers of sets of individuals. This approach synthesises Fine’s concept of qua objects and Larson’s suggestion that Davidsonian event semantics should be applied to adjectival modification. Our analysis captures entailment relations and intensional aspects of modification without recourse to meaning postulates or possible world semantics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our perspective-based semantics naturally accommodates different adjective classes, including subsective, intersective, modal, and privative adjectives.