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I argue that common nouns should be analyzed as variables, rather than as predicates which take variables as arguments. This necessitates several unusual features to the analysis, such as allowing variables to be modally non-rigid, and assigning their values compositionally. However, treating common nouns as variables offers a variety of theoretical and empirical advantages over a more traditional analysis: It predicts the conservativity of nominal quantification, simplifies the analysis of articleless languages, derives the weak reading of sentences with donkey anaphora, solves the proportion problem presented by quantifiers like ‘most’, improves the analysis of the temperature paradox, allows a more unified analysis of bare plurals, and regularizes the correspondence between syntactic categories and semantic types.

This paper argues that truth values of sentences containing predicates of \"personal taste\" such as fun or tasty must be relativized to individuals. This relativization is of truth value only, and does not involve a relativization of semantic content: If you say roller coasters are fun, and I say they are not, I am negating the same content which you assert, and directly contradicting you. Nonetheless, both our utterances can be true (relative to their separate contexts). A formal semantic theory is presented which gives this result by introducing an individual index, analogous to the world and time indices commonly used, and by treating the pragmatic context as supplying a particular value for this index. The context supplies this value in the derivation of truth values from content, not in the derivation of content from character. Predicates of personal taste therefore display a kind of contextual variation in interpretation which is unlike the familiar variation exhibited by pronouns and other indexicals.

Recent arguments for relativist semantic theories have centered on the phenomenon of \"faultless disagreement.\" This paper offers independent motivation for such theories, based on the interpretation of predicates of personal taste in certain attitude contexts and presuppositional constructions. It is argued that the correct interpretation falls out naturally from a relativist theory, but requires special stipulation in a theory which appeals instead to the use of hidden indexicals; and that a hidden indexical analysis presents problems for contemporary syntactic theory.

I argue that compositionality (in the sense of homomorphic interpretation) is compatible with radical and pervasive contextual effects on interpretation. Apparent problems with this claim lose their force if we are careful in distinguishing the question of how a grammar assigns interpretations from the question of how people figure out which interpretations the grammar assigns. I demonstrate, using a simple example, that this latter task must sometimes be done not by computing a derivation defined directly by the grammar, but through the use of pragmatic background knowledge and extragrammatical reasoning, even when the grammar is designed to be fully compositional. The fact that people must sometimes use global pragmatic mechanisms to identify truth conditions therefore tells us nothing about whether the grammar assigns truth conditions compositionally. Compositional interpretation (or the lack thereof) is identifiable not by the mechanisms necessary to calculating truth conditions, but by the structural relation between the interpretation of a phrase in context and the interpretations of its parts in that same context. Even if this relation varies by context, an invariant grammar is possible if grammars can \"invoke\" pragmatic concepts; but this does not imply that grammatical theory must explain these concepts or incorporate a theory of pragmatics.

It is a truism that people speak 'loosely'-that is, that they often say things that we can recognize not to be true, but which come close enough to the truth for practical purposes. Certain expressions, such as those including exactly, all and perfectly, appear to serve as signals of the intended degree of approximation to the truth. This article presents a novel formalism for representing the notion of approximation to the truth, and analyzes the meanings of these expressions in terms of this formalism. Pragmatic looseness of this kind should be distinguished from authentic truth-conditional vagueness.

A problem raised by David R. Dowty et al (1981) for Richard Montague's (1973) analysis of the temperature paradox is reviewed, showing that Montague's treatment of nouns of the type temperature & price as predicates of individual concepts leads to predictions of invalidity for intuitively valid arguments formulated with the verb rise. Dowty et al's suggestion that the problem can be resolved by requiring modally invariant denotations for temperature & price is rejected as a lexically stipulative meaning postulate, & it is proposed instead that Montague's assumption of a quantificational analysis of definite noun phrases be abandoned in favor of a presuppositional analysis in which temperature & price, like other common nouns, are translated into intensional logic as variables of type instead of the higher type <, t> used by Montague. 6 References. J. Hitchcock

Complexity in the application of the distributivity operators proposed by Godehard Link (1987) & Craige Roberts (1987) to nonsubject positions motivates a proposed generalized distributivity operator modeled after generalized operators of conjunction & disjunction. The proposed operator can be combined with expressions from a set of distributable types, defined as conjoinable types containing a conjoinable type & a type e argument. Redefinitions of elements of the semantics of the proposed distributivity operator yield versions of it that implement event-based distributivity, distributivity in the context of pragmatic groupings, & distributivity in terms of conjoinable sets. 24 References. J. Hitchcock