Meanings
- uncountablehuman sciencesAn operation or rule that maps the denotation of an expression of one semantic type to a related denotation of a different type, allowing it to be interpreted with a type other than its basic one.
2 more examples
So in examples involving Antecedent-Contained VP Deletion, we seem to need movement of object DPs anyway. So there are reasons to assume such movement is in principle available, and we might as well use it to resolve the type mismatch in simple sentences with quantified objects as well. An additional mechanism of type-shifting is, at best, redundant.
1998, Irene Heim, Angelika Kratzer, Semantics in Generative Grammar (Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics), Oxford: Blackwell, →ISBN, page 199Much work discussing direct compositionality makes heavy use of type-shifting operators. Type-shifting is a natural tool for building directly compositional analyses, since type-shifting operators are always presented as having a precisely defined semantic effect, often in conjunction with a change of syntactic category.
2007, Chris Barker, Pauline Jacobson, “Introduction: Direct Compositionality”, in Chris Barker, Pauline Jacobson, editors, Direct Compositionality (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics), Oxford: Oxford University Press, page 7
Origin
Cite this entry
type-shifting. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/type-shifting
“type-shifting.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/type-shifting. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “type-shifting,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/type-shifting.
Source: type-shifting on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.