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Counterfactuals, dispositions, and conscious experience : essays on entropy
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001)
Chapter 1 of this thesis concerns counterfactual conditionals. David Lewis has offered a natural and influential analysis of counterfactuals. But the analysis fails to take into account the asymmetry of entropy, and comes ...
Plural predication
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001)
My thesis consists of three self-contained but interconnected papers. In the first one, 'Word and Objects', I assume that it is possible to quantify over absolutely everything, and show that certain English sentences ...
Givenness, focus, and prosody
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001)
In this dissertation, I investigate the grammatical effects of focus and the inseparable phenomenon of givenness. As Schwarzschild (1999) has proposed, a proper understanding of givenness eliminates the need for a separate ...
Cyclicity and the scope of wh-phrases
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001)
This thesis argues that in a constituent question with a universal quantifier, syntactic reconstruction of the wh-phrase below the quantifier is the source of scope ambiguities. In particular, I argue, based on the interaction ...
Topics in Turkish syntax : clausal structure and scope
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001)
This dissertation asks two main questions for Turkish: (i) what is the interaction between verbal morphology and the structure?, and (ii) what is the interaction between word order and interpretation? Following Kornfilt ...
On reduced relatives with genitive subjects
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001)
What is the place of relatives with genitive subjects in a typology of relative clauses? Are they full or reduced, headed or free relatives? Can they appear pre- and postnominally? Can they be head-internal relatives? Are ...
Vague objects
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001)
Peter Unger's puzzle, the problem of the many, is an argument for the conclusion that we are grossly mistaken about what kinds of objects are in our immediate surroundings. But it is not clear what we should make of Unger's ...
Studies in belief and belief attribution
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001)
My dissertation is about Frege's classic problem of the morning and the evening star. I distinguish two aspects of the problem. One aspect I call it psychological, and it consists in describing the content of the beliefs ...
Comparative quantifiers
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001)
The main goal of the thesis is to present a novel analysis of comparative quantifiers such as more than three students. The prevalent view on such expressions advocated in Generalized Quantifier Theory is that they denoted ...
The semantics and metaphysics of contingent identity
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001)
The thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter considers how we ought to understand a thesis of contingent identity if it is to accomplish the work it is proposed to accomplish while at the same time avoiding ...