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Some problems concerning the logic of grammatical modifiers

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Abstract

This paper consists principally of selections from a much longer work on the semantics of English. It discusses some problems concerning how to represent grammatical modifiers (e.g. ‘slowly’ in ‘x drives slowly’) in a logically perspicuous notation. A proposal of Reichenbach's is given and criticized; then a ‘new’ theory (apparently discovered independently by myself, Romain Clark, and Richard Montague and Hans Kamp) is given, in which grammatical modifiers are represented by operators added to a first-order predicate calculus. Finally some problems concerning applications of adjectives to that-clauses and gerundive-clauses are discussed.

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Parsons, T. Some problems concerning the logic of grammatical modifiers. Synthese 21, 320–334 (1970). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00484803

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