Monotonicity in Opaque Verbs

Neither arbitrary horses, nor intentional lions, nor generic unicorns are animals, and would-be assistents do not have to be assistents.2 In fact, one may well wonder just what sort of objects the paraphrases in (0') are supposed to be about. Given their dubious ontological status, an analysis of (0) that can do without them ought to be preferrable to one along the lines of (0') – ceteris paribus. Such analyses have been developed, based on the observation3 that opaque verbs tend to express propositional attitudes (in a broad sense). Following them, instead of trying to make literal sense of (0'), it is more worthwhile to explore the (admittedly rough) paraphrases under (0") instead, thereby reducing the strangeness of (0) to an interaction of the lexical meaning of the opaque verb and the ordinary meaning of the indefinite as existentially quantifying over the extension of its head noun:4