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Contributors
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- By Ghazi Al-Rawas, Vazken Andréassian, Tianqi Ao, Stacey A. Archfield, Berit Arheimer, András Bárdossy, Trent Biggs, Günter Blöschl, Theresa Blume, Marco Borga, Helge Bormann, Gianluca Botter, Tom Brown, Donald H. Burn, Sean K. Carey, Attilio Castellarin, Francis Chiew, François Colin, Paulin Coulibaly, Armand Crabit, Barry Croke, Siegfried Demuth, Qingyun Duan, Giuliano Di Baldassarre, Thomas Dunne, Ying Fan, Xing Fang, Boris Gartsman, Alexander Gelfan, Mikhail Georgievski, Nick van de Giesen, David C. Goodrich, Hoshin V. Gupta, Khaled Haddad, David M. Hannah, H. A. P. Hapuarachchi, Hege Hisdal, Kamila Hlavčová, Markus Hrachowitz, Denis A. Hughes, Günter Humer, Ruud Hurkmans, Vito Iacobellis, Elena Ilyichyova, Hiroshi Ishidaira, Graham Jewitt, Shaofeng Jia, Jeffrey R. Kennedy, Anthony S. Kiem, Robert Kirnbauer, Thomas R. Kjeldsen, Jürgen Komma, Leonid M. Korytny, Charles N. Kroll, George Kuczera, Gregor Laaha, Henny A. J. van Lanen, Hjalmar Laudon, Jens Liebe, Shijun Lin, Göran Lindström, Suxia Liu, Jun Magome, Danny G. Marks, Dominic Mazvimavi, Jeffrey J. McDonnell, Brian L. McGlynn, Kevin J. McGuire, Neil McIntyre, Thomas A. McMahon, Ralf Merz, Robert A. Metcalfe, Alberto Montanari, David Morris, Roger Moussa, Lakshman Nandagiri, Thomas Nester, Taha B. M. J. Ouarda, Ludovic Oudin, Juraj Parajka, Charles S. Pearson, Murray C. Peel, Charles Perrin, John W. Pomeroy, David A. Post, Ataur Rahman, Liliang Ren, Magdalena Rogger, Dan Rosbjerg, José Luis Salinas, Jos Samuel, Eric Sauquet, Hubert H. G. Savenije, Takahiro Sayama, John C. Schaake, Kevin Shook, Murugesu Sivapalan, Jon Olav Skøien, Chris Soulsby, Christopher Spence, R. ‘Sri’ Srikanthan, Tammo S. Steenhuis, Jan Szolgay, Yasuto Tachikawa, Kuniyoshi Takeuchi, Lena M. Tallaksen, Dörthe Tetzlaff, Sally E. Thompson, Elena Toth, Peter A. Troch, Remko Uijlenhoet, Carl L. Unkrich, Alberto Viglione, Neil R. Viney, Richard M. Vogel, Thorsten Wagener, M. Todd Walter, Guoqiang Wang, Markus Weiler, Rolf Weingartner, Erwin Weinmann, Hessel Winsemius, Ross A. Woods, Dawen Yang, Chihiro Yoshimura, Andy Young, Gordon Young, Erwin Zehe, Yongqiang Zhang, Maichun C. Zhou
- Edited by Günter Blöschl, Technische Universität Wien, Austria, Murugesu Sivapalan, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Thorsten Wagener, University of Bristol, Alberto Viglione, Technische Universität Wien, Austria, Hubert Savenije, Technische Universiteit Delft, The Netherlands
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- Book:
- Runoff Prediction in Ungauged Basins
- Published online:
- 05 April 2013
- Print publication:
- 18 April 2013, pp ix-xiv
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Quantifiers, definite descriptions, and reference
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- By Colin Biggs
- Edward L. Keenan
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- Book:
- Formal Semantics of Natural Language
- Published online:
- 05 November 2011
- Print publication:
- 11 December 1975, pp 112-120
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Summary
When the Messenger in Through the Looking Glass told the King that nobody walked faster than he did, Alice was puzzled that the King accused the Messenger of being a liar: on the grounds that if nobody walked faster than he did, then nobody would have got there first. Clearly NPs like nobody (if indeed they are NPs) do not refer in any straightforward way. I shall, to give a label, call such surface structure NPs as nobody, all men, every stupid academic ‘quantified NPs’: they correspond to what Geach (following W. E. Johnston) calls ‘applicatival phrases’ (being phrases formed from a general term plus an applicative). But if quantified NPs do not refer in any straightforward way, do they refer at all? Moreover, in general what requirements does the presence of such NPs impose on the semantics of host sentences?
Clearly anything like an adequate answer to such questions would take us over much ground. I shall here confine myself to examining a small subset of the possible concatenations involving quantified NPs. In so doing I hope to shed some light on the behaviour of definite descriptions in certain roles.
One possibility for concatenation with quantified NPs has been much discussed in the literature of linguistics: that involving the co-habitation within a sentence of two quantified NPs having superficially the same structure, and being composed of the same morphological units.
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