We are happy to announce a talk by Jan Köpping (Frankfurt) in the Semantics Colloquium.
The talk will take place on campus in IG 4.301.
If you wish to participate virtually via Zoom, please contact Lennart Fritzsche for the link.
Date: November 13, 2025
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm c.t.
Title: Non-normally modified descriptions and (non-)existence entailing predicates (joint work with Dolf Rami)
Abstract:
Existence entailments are a recurring topic in philosophy of language. According to a widespread view, they arise due to the truthful use of the so-called “existential quantifier” (going back to W.V.O. Quine’s slogan “to be is to be the value of a bound variable”). This talk presents our alternative to this view that focuses on the position variables occupy in the logical form of sentences. It argues that the presence of (non-)existence entailments depends on the type of argument position that the (more correctly:) “particular quantifier” binds into. After a brief sketch of the general architecture of the theory, we present linguistic evidence in favor of our rough three-way distinction among types of argument slots (“existence entailing”, “nonexistence entailing”, “neutral”) of predicates and a distinction between two types of modifiers (“normal” vs. “non-normal”). It relies on the analysis of DPs that host a modified head noun and observations concerning the scope of the operator the modifier is built from. Finally, we develop a formal semantic framework that is able to model the phenomena described.