MoL-2007-10: Individual-level Predicates and When-Conditionals

MoL-2007-10: Chabot, David (2007) Individual-level Predicates and When-Conditionals. [Report]

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Abstract

The present thesis, as the title suggests, is primarily concerned with
the distinction between stage-level predicates (henceforth SLPs) and
individual-level predicates (ILPs) and particularly with what we might
call when-conditionals. The distinction between SLPs and ILPs was
first proposed in Carlson's dissertation in which he divides the class
of predicates into individual-level, stage-level and kind-level,
roughly pertaining to how a given predicate relates to its subject.

According to Carlson, the class of individual-level predicates
consists in the stative verbs, all predicative NPs (`be a man', `be a
mammal', etc.) and adjectives like `intelligent', `tall ', `blue'
(vs. `drunk', `available', etc.). Roughly speaking, individual-level
predicates are thought has expressing `permanent' properties whereas
stage-level predicates are assumed to denote `transient' or `episodic'
ones. For instance, to take only one example from the data, `John is
tall in the car.' is odd because tall is an individual-level predicate
i.e., roughly speaking, it denotes a permanent property (and so, as
has been assumed, cannot be restricted to a location). On the other
hand, an adjective like `drunk', which is stage-level, is perfectly
fine in a similar sentence: `John is drunk in the car.'

Since this first proposal, the SLP/ILP distinction has received a
considerable amount of attention and different key properties have
been identified in the literature as criteria for the characterization
of individual-level predicates. Several authors (including Carlson,
Diesing, Kratzer and Chierchia) have claimed that SLPs and ILPs have
fundamentally different grammatical properties and that the
distinction has repercussions in several modules of grammar.

The first two sections will be dedicated to their proposals. In
section 2, I will briefly present the various contrasts that have been
proposed as characterizing the SLP/ILP distinction. Those contrasts
have been considered as genuine grammatical differences by the
aforementioned authors. In this section, these contrasts will be
presented under this perspective, i.e. the contrasts are presented as
being the data to be explained. In section 3, I will present the three
main theories aimed at giving a uniform account to the data, namely
Carlson's, Kratzer's and Chierchia's. We will begin with Carlson's
theory which consists roughly in a sortal distinction. Whether a
predicate is stagelevel or not boils down on what it takes as its
argument, a stage-level predicate takes stages as its arguments and an
individual-level predicate takes individuals; where a stage should
roughly be thought as a temporal slice of an individual. In other
words, Carlson proposes an ontological difference between two kind of
entities in the domain: individuals and stages. The former being
`four-dimensional worms' made up of stages.

Kratzer and Chierchia's theories do not make an ontological
distinction. Kratzer's theory is that stage-level predicates, as
opposed to individual-level predicates, have an `extra' place for a
Davidsonian argument that should be thought as a spatiotemporal
location variables. For example, the logical form of `Mary is drunk'
would be something similar to `D(m,l)' (as opposed to `D(m)'), where
`l' is the Davidsonian argument. Chierchia, on the other hand, assumes
that all predicates have a place for a Davidsonian argument; the
difference being that the lexical entry of an individual-level
predicate triggers a phonetically covert quantifier in its semantical
representation that bounds it.

Two main theses will be defended against the aforementioned
authors. The first is that the contrasts that have been subsumed under
the SLP/ILP distinction form a disparate set. Section 4 will be
dedicated to this issue, where the data identified as belonging to the
SLP/ILP distinction will be analyzed in detail. As I will show, the
observed contrasts are not uniform but rather a collection of related
but different distinctions.

The second thesis is that the predicates called SLPs and ILPs do not
differ in their grammatical properties. As I will argue, the main
difference between the two kinds of predicates resides in world
knowledge: there is no genuinely grammatical distinction between SLPs
and ILPs that reflects some fundamental conceptual split. As a matter
of fact, the classification of a predicate as belonging to one class
or the other turns out to be highly dependent on world and contextual
knowledge, while lexical properties are commonly considered to be far
less flexible.

The second part of the present thesis will be focused on
when-conditionals, one of the main contrasts subsumed under the
SLP/ILP heading. When-conditionals are sentences where the when-clause
does not set a topic time, as in `When I was a kid,...', but rather
serves as a protasis (i.e. the subordinate clause of a conditional
sentence). A prototypical example of when-conditionals is a sentence
where the situation described in the when-clause held at least twice
at different moments and the consequent is said to hold at these
times. For instance, (1-a) is a when-conditional whereas (1-b) is not:

(1) a. When I go to my office, I usually take my umbrella with me.
b. When I went to my office yesterday, I realized I had forgotten
my umbrella.

In section 6, we will thus briefly discuss some aspects of
when-constructions and which properties they have. This should give us
a minimal set of requirements for their semantics. Finally, I will
propose a minimal account for when-conditionals in a dynamic framework
close to Groenendijk and Stokhof's Dynamic Predicate Logic and
Veltman's Update Semantics. The idea is to use DPL in a framework able
to model world knowledge. The account is minimal in multiple
respects. For instance, when-constructions, as will be explained in
section 6, have very particular properties with respect to their
behavior with tenses and adverbs of quantification like `usually',
`always', `sometimes', etc. Problems with the formalization will be
pointed out along the way and possible extensions of the framework
will be discussed. The formalization of when-conditionals that will be
presented here is not aimed to be definitive or complete but a step
forward in their understanding.

Item Type:	Report
Report Nr:	MoL-2007-10
Series Name:	Master of Logic Thesis (MoL) Series
Year:	2007
Date Deposited:	12 Oct 2016 14:38
Last Modified:	12 Oct 2016 14:38
URI:	https://eprints.illc.uva.nl/id/eprint/782

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