That is Rosa: Identificational Sentences as Intensional Predication

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of identificational sentences like That is a woman and That is Rosa as predicational sentences. We argue that the pre-copular demon- strative denotes an individual concept and that the post-copular phrase denotes a sort, in the sense of Gupta (1980): a function from worlds into sets of individual concepts. These sentences provide evidence for a model in which transworld identity is a nontrivial relation and is expressed by nouns.