profile picture

Friederike Moltmann

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
 More details
  •  368
    The Number of Planets, a Number-Referring Term?
    In Philip A. Ebert & Marcus Rossberg (eds.), Abstractionism: Essays in Philosophy of Mathematics, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 113-129. 2016.
    The question whether numbers are objects is a central question in the philosophy of mathematics. Frege made use of a syntactic criterion for objethood: numbers are objects because there are singular terms that stand for them, and not just singular terms in some formal language, but in natural language in particular. In particular, Frege (1884) thought that both noun phrases like the number of planets and simple numerals like eight as in (1) are singular terms referring to numbers as abstract obj…Read more
    Numerical ExpressionsNumbersMathematical Neo-Fregeanism
  •  576
    Tropes, Intensional Relative Clauses, and the Notion of a Variable Object
    In Aloni Maria, Kimmelman Vadim, Weidman Sassoon Galit, Roloefson Floris, Schulz Katrin & Westera Matthjis (eds.), Proceedings of the 18th Amsterdam Colloquium 2011, Springer. 2012.
    NPs with intensional relative clauses such as 'the impact of the book John needs to write' pose a significant challenge for trope theory (the theory of particularized properties), since they seem to refer to tropes that lack an actual bearer. This paper proposes a novel semantic analysis of such NPs on the basis of the notion of a variable object. The analysis avoids a range of difficulties that an alternative analysis based on the notion of an individual concept would face.
    Descriptions, MiscOntology, MiscMinor Entities, MiscObjects and Properties, MiscTropes
  •  200
    Plural Reference and Syntactic Three-Dimensionality (book proposal, under contract)
    Oxford University Press. forthcoming.
    The book argues for Plural Reference for the semantics of natural language and makes the connection between Plural Reference and Alternative Semantics for the purpose of the interpretation of three-dimensional syntactic structures of coordinate sentences (in the sense of my 1992 MIT Ph D thesis)
    Plural Quantification
  •  617
    On the Interpretation of Three-Dimensional Syntactic Trees
    In Chris Barker & David Dowty (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 2, Ohio State University, . 1992.
    Syntacticians have proposed three-dimensional syntactic structures to account for the peculiarities of coordination. This paper proposes a way of interpreting such structures and gives an account of sentences of the sort 'John bought and Mary sold a total of ten cars' based on a notion of 'implicit' coordination.
    ConjunctionCompositionalitySyntactic Phenomena
  •  1007
    Nominals and Event Structure
    In Robert Truswell (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Event Structure, . 2019.
    This paper discusses three approaches to the semantics of event nominalizations and adverbial modification: the Davidsonian account, the Kimian account, and the truthmaker account. It argues that a combination of all three accounts is needed for the semantics of the full range of event, trope, and state nominalizations in English.
    AdverbsNounsTruthmakers
  •  920
    Generic one, arbitrary PRO, and the first person
    Natural Language Semantics 14 (3). 2006.
    The generic pronoun 'one' (or its empty counterpart, arbitrary PRO) exhibits a range of properties that show a special connection to the first person, or rather the relevant intentional agent (speaker, addressee, or described agent). The paper argues that generic 'one' involves generic quantification in which the predicate is applied to a given entity ‘as if’ to the relevant agent himself. This is best understood in terms of simulation, a central notion in some recent developments in the philoso…Read more
    First-Person ContentsQuantifiersImagination and PretenseGenericsThe First-Person PronounPronouns and…Read more
  •  127
    Exception sentences and polyadic quantification
    Linguistics and Philosophy 18 (3). 1995.
    In this paper, I have proposed a compositional semantic analysis of exception NPs from which three core properties of exception constructions could be derived. I have shown that this analysis overcomes various empirical and conceptual shortcomings of prior proposals of the semantics of exception sentences. The analysis was first formulated for simple exception NPs, where the EP-complement was considered a set-denoting term and the EP-associate was a monadic quantifier. It was then generalized in…Read more
    Quantifiers