A system of semantic primitives

This paper sketches a semantic theory for verbs, based on the analysis of Gruber (1965) and Jackendoff (1972), which expresses certain semantic generalization in such a way that they correspond very closely to syntactic generalizations. The generality of the semantic analysis will be demonstrated by stating inference rules whose side applicability depends crucially on the form of the semantics. Thus it will be shown that the choice of semantic primitives made here is explanatory in the sense set out above. The theory is expounded in much greater detail in Jackendoff (1975), of which this is an extreme condensation