| Summary: | Landman (1989) introduced contemporary linguistics to the as-phrase. An as-phrase
is a qualifier, introduced in English by "as." "John is corrupt as a judge," for instance,
contains the as-phrase "as a judge." Philosophical discourse is full of examples of
as-phrase sentences. Their presence can make it difficult to distinguish valid from
invalid arguments, a perennial concern for philosophers. Landman proposed the first
formal semantic theory of as-phrases, based on a set of seven intuitively-valid patterns
of inference involving as-phrases. Szabó (2003), Jaeger (2003), Asher (2011) each
attempt to improve upon Landman's theory.
Chapter 1 reviews and criticizes a temporal account of as-phrase semantics,
while tracing some precedents and motivations for my approach. Chapters 2-3 criticize
Szabó's and Asher's theories. Szabó's theory shows problems handling the future
tense and intensional contexts. Asher's complex theory solves these problems, but
resorts to the obscure notions of relative identity and bare particulars.
Chapter 4 argues that neither Szabó's nor Asher's theory is clearly superior, because
implicitly, they focus on different classes of sentences, which I call "Type A" and
"Type B." From John Bowers' syntactic research, I argue that the element common
to Type A and Type B is Pr, a predication head pronounced "as" in some contexts.
Chapter 5 develops a formal semantic theory tailored to Type A sentences that solves
the problems of Szabó's theory while avoiding Asher's assumptions. On my approach,
the semantic properties of Type A sentences resolve into an interaction among generic
quantifiers, determiner-phrase interpretation, and one core quantifier based on a principal
ultrafilter. It is the interaction-effects of these elements that give rise to the many
unusual readings we find in these as-phrase sentences. This result supports my motivating
view that linguistic research helps to solve semantic problems of philosophical
interest.
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