Reference to Tropes and the Ontology of Tropes
Reference to Tropes and the Ontology of Tropes
Tropes, that is, particularized properties, play a significant role both in contemporary metaphysics and in the history of philosophy (wherethey are also called “accidents,”“modes,” or “moments”). This chapter shows that tropes play an important role in the semantics of natural language, especially the semantics of de002D;adjectival nominalizations and adjectives. The chapter gives a general introduction to the notion of a trope, distinguishes various types of tropes, and gives an account of events in terms of tropes. It argues that the standard notion of a trope needs to be replaced by more complex notions in order to account for the semantics of relative and gradable adjectives. It also gives an account of related categories of entities that need to be sharply distinguished from tropes, namely states and facts, which unlike tropes are abstract entities.
Keywords: tropes, particularized properties, events, facts, numbers, degrees, adjectives, comparatives
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