The aim of the paper is to reconstruct key metaphysical presuppositions on which Thomas Aquinas grounds his analogical predication God and creatures. By doing so one can get a better grip what means in how term predicated differs meaning from that ascribed creatures, e.g. “wise”. First, there are two kinds property based mode ontological realization creatures (essential participation). These di...

This paper argues for non-primary cand s-selectional restrictions of verbs in computing nonprimary predicatives such as resultatives, depictives, and manners. Our discussion is based both on the selection violations in the presence of nonprimary predicates and on the cross-linguistic and language-internal variations of categorial and semantic constraints on nonprimary predicates. We claim that ...

English sentences such as I consider John smart have long presented analytic ambiguity between a “small clause” analysis and a “predication” analysis, and the apparently equivalent sentence-type in Greek, e.g. presents similar problems. Here it is argued that additional evidence from each language, involving constructions that are sensitive to the thematicity of an object NP, shows that these s...

This paper addresses the question of how to model the application of vague predicates like tall and bald to plural subjects like John and Mary and the men. In other words, we are interested in developing a logical analysis for natural language sentences like Mary is tall and The men are bald. In the past 30 years, much research has been devoted to finding the proper logical framework to model t...

A predicate logic typically has a heterogeneous semantic theory. Subjects and predicates have distinct semantic roles: subjects refer; predicates characterize. A sentence expresses a truth if the object to which the subject refers is correctly characterized by the predicate. Traditional term logic, by contrast, has a homogeneous theory: both subjects and predicates refer; and a sentence is true...

Corpus-derived distributional models of semantic distance between terms have proved useful in a number of applications. For both theoretical and practical reasons, it is desirable to extend these models to encode discrete concepts and the ways in which they are related to one another. In this paper, we present a novel vector space model that encodes semantic predications derived from MEDLINE by...

This paper offers a new semantic theory of existentials (sentences of the form There be NPpivot XPcoda) in which pivots are (second order) predicates and codas are modifiers. The theory retains the analysis of pivots as denoting generalized quantifiers (Barwise and Cooper 1981; Keenan 1987), but departs from previous analyses in analyzing codas as contextual modifiers on a par with temporal/loc...

ABSTRACTABSTRACTOver the course of past ten-plus years, Peter Hanks and Scott Soames have developed detailed versions Act-Based views propositions which operate with notions reference to objects, indicating properties, predication, judgment (or entertaining). In this paper I discuss certain foundational aspects approach having do relations between these notions. particular, argue for following ...