Abstract
One popular way1 of classifying utterances involves intuitions about their “topichood,” or basic predicational structure. One often hears the suggestion that some utterances are “about an individual,” or have a clear predicational structure; while others are neutral descriptions of eventualities, or lack a clear predicational structure. I will assume that this basic classification has some reality, and following one line of literature, I will refer to the former type of utterance as categorical, and the latter as thetic (notions originally due to Brentano and Marty; see e.g. Kuroda 1972, 1992; Sasse 1987; Ladusaw 1994). Although these terms originally referred to types of judgments, i.e. cognitive acts, I will also use them to describe the sentence forms and utterances (or statements) that represent these judgment types. Thus, e.g. “thetic sentence” should be understood as shorthand for “sentence used to represent a thetic judgment.”
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McNally, L. (1998). Stativity and Theticity. In: Rothstein, S. (eds) Events and Grammar. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3969-4_12
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