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Now published: TL target article with comments: 'Truthmaker Semantics for Natural Language: Attitude Verbs, Modals, and Intensional Transitive Verbs'

Posted On: December 07, 2020

'Truthmaker Semantics for Natural Language: Attitude Verbs, Modals, and Intensional Transitive Verbs', Theoretical Linguistics 46, 3-4, 2020, pp. 159-200

This paper gives an outline of truthmaker semantics for natural language against the background of standard possible-worlds semantics. It develops a truthmaker semantics for attitude reports and deontic modals based on an ontology of attitudinal and modal objects and on a semantic function of clauses as predicates of such objects. The semantics is applied to factive verbs and response-stance verbs as well as to cases of modal concord. The paper also presents new motivations for 'object-based truthmaker semantics' from intensional transitive verbs such as need, look for, own, and buy and gives an outline of their semantics based on a further development of truthmaker semantics.

This is a target article commissioned by Theoretical Linguistics, with the following commentators and my reply here:

Reply to the comments: 'Truthmaker-Based Content: Syntactic, Semantic, and Ontological Contexts'.

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