Word.ws English Dictionary

type-shifting

type-shifting noun: an 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.

Noun

type-shifting (uncountable)

  1. An 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.
    • 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...1998, Irene Heim, Angelika Kratzer, Semantics in Generative Grammar (Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics), Oxford: Blackwell, →ISBN, page 199
    • Much 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...2007, Chris Barker, Pauline Jacobson, “Introduction: Direct Compositionality”, in Chris Barker, Pauline Jacobson, editors, Direct Compositionality (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics), Oxford...

Examples of type-shifting in a sentence

  • 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...
  • Much work discussing direct compositionality makes heavy use of type-shifting operators.2007, Chris Barker, Pauline Jacobson, “Introduction: Direct Compositionality”, in Chris Barker, Pauline Jacobson, editors, Direct...

Origin of type-shifting

From type + shifting

Questions about type-shifting

What does type-shifting mean?
Type-shifting means an 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.
How do you use type-shifting in a sentence?
An additional mechanism of type-shifting is, at best, redundant.
What part of speech is type-shifting?
Type-shifting is a noun.

Words near type-shifting in the dictionary

  1. type-high
  2. type-in
  3. type-ins
  4. type-safe
  5. type-setting
  6. type-shifting
  7. type-site
  8. type-sites
  9. type-token distinction
  10. type-token distinctions
  11. type-token ratio

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: type-shifting (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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