Specific, yet opaque

Abstract

In her dissertation, Janet Fodor has argued that the quantificational force and the intensional status of certain quantifier phrases can be evaluated independently. The proposal was only halfway accepted: the existence of non-specific transparent readings is well-established today, but specific opaque readings are deemed illusory. I argue that they are real and outline a semantic framework that can generate them. The idea is to permit two types of quantifier raising: one that carries the restrictor of the determiner along and another that does not. When the second is applied the restrictor can be stranded within the scope of an intensional operator as the quantificational determiner itself takes wider scope. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.