 NPs such as the increasing air in the balloon, the rising temperature, the people that can fit into the car, or the book John needs to write appear to behave like referential NPs and have been analyzed as standing for particular sorts of entities, variable embodiments or variable objects (Fine 1999; Moltmann 2013: chap. 4), entities that are hardly part of the ontology speakers in general accept when thinking about what there is. There are alternatives to the ontological analysis, though, such as that of Montague (Montague 1974), who took the temperature to stand for a functional concept, and of Grosu &amp; Krifka (2007), who took the related NP the gifted mathematician you claim to be to stand for an individual concept.