Nominalizations: The Case of Nominalizations of Modal Predicates
نویسنده
چکیده
Nominalizations describing events and tropes have a received considerable interest in the semantic (and philosophical) literature. By contrast, nominalizations of modal predicates and the modal objects they describe have received little, if any, attention in the literature so far. This paper is a case study of nominalizations of the sort need and possibility as well as permission, obligation, invitation, offer, and ability. The paper will argue that nominalizations of modal predicates require recognizing a novel ontological category of modal objects, entities that arguably play a role also in the semantics of modal sentences in general. The paper will give a general characterization of modal objects and address the question how two familiar semantic nominalization strategies fare in regard to how the semantics of the nominalization may be obtained from the underlying modal predicate. Those strategies are the Davidsonian account of nominalizations, which takes nominalizations to pick up an implicit argument of the underlying predicate, and the Kimian (pleonastic) account, which takes nominalizations to introduce 'new' objects into the semantic structure of a sentence that would not have been present otherwise. The paper will argue that both the Davidsonian account and the Kimian account may be needed for the full range of nominalizations of modal predicates. The paper will furthermore outline a new semantics of modals based on modal objects.
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