Speaker: Zachary Feldcamp (MIT)
Title: Generalization X under Movement
Time: Wednesday, September 23, 1-2 p.m.
Location: 32-D461
Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/92053685079
Abstract: Noun phrases may often be interpreted either de re or de dicto with respect to an intensional operator, while predicates are obligatorily interpreted de dicto (Percus’s 2000 Generalization X). Existing accounts capture this asymmetry by constraining the relation between a predicate’s LF position and its intensional interpretation. I investigate what happens when a predicate overtly raises across an intensional operator in “predicate inversion” constructions such as With Taylor is believed to be a lawyer. I show that such predicates remain obligatorily de dicto, even though independent binding and Condition C diagnostics indicate that they need not syntactically reconstruct. This creates a reconstruction paradox: the raised predicate must be interpreted upstairs for some purposes but downstairs for intensionality. The result poses a problem both for scope theories and for theories that posit a predicate-internal intensional variable. I argue that the data instead favor a treatment of intensionality in which predicates take an intensional argument, and that, if this argument is saturated by a variable, such a variable must compose above the predicate constituent. I then explore how such an analysis can be implemented through semantic reconstruction while preserving the familiar de re/de dicto flexibility of nominal arguments.