On the proper treatment of opacity in certain verbs

摘要

This paper is about the semantic analysis of referentially opaque verbs likeseekandowethat give rise to nonspecific readings. It is argued that Montague's categorization (based on earlier work by Quine) of opaque verbs as properties of quantifiers runs into two serious difficulties: the first problem is that it does not work with opaque verbs likeresemblethat resist any lexical decomposition of theseek ≈ try to findkind; the second one is that it wrongly predicts de dicto (i.e. narrow scope) readings due to quantified noun phrases in the object positions of such verbs. It is shown that both difficulties can be overcome by an analysis of opaque verbs as operating on propertie