The notion has been around since the beginnings of formal semantics that the literal meaning of a sentence should be a function of the meanings of its parts and of the way they are syntactically combined. Under this view, the meaning of a noun phrase (NP) such as the capital of Germany is identified with the referent that such expression picks out in the actual world. In fact, (1a) is synonymous with (1b).

(1a) The capital of Germany is a beautiful city.
(1b) Berlin is a beautiful city.

However, a core characteristic of human language is that it is not restricted to discourse about the actual here and now. Several forms of displacements are, in fact, possible along the spatio-temporal or modal dimension; the corresponding linguistic contexts are classified as intensional constructions. Such contexts seem to be able to systematically affect the interpretation of NPs. For example, it is clear that the NP the capital of Germany cannot be freely substituted with the name Berlin in the intensional contexts provided in (2) below.

(2a) Before 1871, the capital of Germany did not exist.
(2b) Sarah thinks that the capital of Germany is Paris.




The aim of the project is to investigate the properties of NPs in intensional argument positions, with a particular focus on the following constructions:

• Objects of intensional verbs (Magda is looking for a solution.); treated mostly as properties, following Zimmermann (1993).


• Subjects of intensional verbs (The temperature is rising.); following Montague (1974), they have given rise to the assumption that (some) common nouns denote sets of individual concepts instead of sets of individuals, despite well-known problems of doubled index dependence (cf. Dowty, Wall, Peters 1981).


• Concealed questions (I know Ilaria's telephone number.); under a highly salient reading, the DP seems to make the semantic contribution of an embedded question ( ... what Ilaria's telephone number is); analyses vary from ascription of properties to individiuals, over individual concepts evaluated at doxastic alternatives, to quantification over propositions true at doxastic alternatives.


• Referential expressions in attitude reports, which pose well-known problems for attitude reports, resulting in familiar ambiguities of de re- and de dicto-readings (cf. Quine 1956).


• Non-standard interpretations for indexicals that are available in particular modal contexts (e.g. impersonal 1st person pronouns in German, Zobel 2010).

The aim of the research group is to investigate and to model the interaction between literal (semantic) meaning and contextual settings such as to account for the truth-conditions and utterance meanings one can observe for the respective examples.