Abstract

Approximately thirty years ago, Barbara H. Partee tried to think of counterexamples to David Lewis’s observation that no intransitive verbs appeared to have intensional subject positions. She came up with such verbs as ‘rise,’ ‘change,’ and ‘increase.’ Lewis agreed that they were indeed counterexamples to his observation. He mentioned it to Richard Montague, who incorporated these verbs into his now famous grammatical theory for English.