Fictional modifiers: a world-semantic approach

In this article, we study a rather neglected class of adjectival modifiers, namely modifiers that connect the content of their modified noun to fiction or imagination in some way. We disentangle ambiguous uses and explore their systematic consequences for (non-)existence entailments that can be drawn from the truthful modification in one use but do not hold in other uses. Observations like these form the desiderata for any formal semantic account. The novel world-semantics we provide in this article is able to model the behavior of these modifiers by allowing for what we call non-normal modifiers, i.e., modifiers that shift the parameter of evaluation for the nouns’ contribution to metaphysically impossible worlds. This allows us to systematically derive the presence or absence of (non-)existence entailments.