Some Frills for Modal Tic-Tac-Toe: Semantics of Predicate Complement Constructions

Predicate complement constructions are a rich source of semantic problems. A system for testing the semantic properties (presuppositions and entailments) of predicate complement constructions has been constructed, and, in particular, the implementations of these constructions have been explored in some detail in the context of the tic-tac-toe game-playing setting of Isard and Longuet-Higgins [2] and Davies and Isard [1]. Even in such a limited setting, the implementations of many of these constructions (especially composite predicate complement constructions) are nontrivial, suggesting that such restricted settings provide a good testing ground for many key linguistic problems.