The starting point of this talk is an observation due to Nathan (2006): sentences of the form 'every NP changed' tend to be interpreted in one of two ways. This can be illustrated by contrasting (1) and (2): for sentence (1) to be true, it must be that I replaced every book on my shelf with a book that wasn't on my shelf before; sentence (2), on the other hand, can be true even if the members of the set of governors remain the same --- e.g., it can be true in a scenario in which the governors just swapped positions. Nathan argued that the distribution of these two interpretations is determined by formal properties of the NPs involved --- namely, by whether they're headed by a relational noun or not.
(1) Every book on my shelf changed.
(2) Every governor changed.
In this talk, I propose a novel solution to this puzzle. Following Montague (1973), I take NPs in these sentences to be interpreted not as predicates of ordinary individuals but as predicates of intensional individuals (so-called individual concepts). However, unlike Montague, I take the basic meaning of nouns to be n-place predicates of individuals and advance a uniform theory of how NPs can be shifted into predicates of individual concepts which highlights the role of the NP's internal structure. Nathan's observation will then follow from how this shifting procedure interacts with other quantifiers within the NP.