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Clarification requests are an important, relatively common and yet under-studied dialogue device allowing a user to ask about some feature (e.g. the meaning or form) of an utterance, or part thereof. They can take many different forms (often highly elliptical) and can have many different meanings (requesting various types of information). This thesis combines empirical, theoretical and implementational work to provide a study of the various types of clarification request that exist, give a theoretical analysis thereof, and show how the results can be applied to add useful capabilities to a prototype computational dialogue system. A series

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The main goal of the thesis is to present a novel analysis of comparative quantifiers such as more than three students. The prevalent view on such expressions advocated in Generalized Quantifier Theory is that they denoted generalized quantifiers ranging over individuals – entirely on a par with expressions like every student, some student(s), etc. According to this view, more than three is a determiner (like every) that is, even though morpho-syntactically complex, semantically a simplex expression that can – in terms of its interactions with the syntactic environment it appears in – be viewed as denoting simply a relation between sets of individuals. The proposal that will be developed in this thesis maintains on the other hand that expressions like more than three are also semantically complex. More specifically, an analysis of comparative quantifiers will be given that is fully compositional down to level of the formation of comparative determiners. The proposal is based on concepts that are independently needed to analyze comparative constructions.

This paper explores the link between number marking and (in)definiteness in nominals and their interpretation. Differences between bare singulars and plurals in languages without determiners are explained by treating bare nominals as kind terms. Differences arise, it is argued, because singular and plural kinds relate differently to their instantiations. In languages with determiners, singular kinds typically occur with the definite determiner, but plural/mass kinds can be bare in some languages and definite in others. An account of singular kinds in terms of taxonomic readings is proposed, with number marking playing a crucial role in explaining the obligatory presence of the determiner. The variation between languages with respect to plural/mass kinds is explained by positing a universal scale of definiteness, with individual languages choosing different cut-off points for lexicalization of the definite determiner. The possibility of further cross-linguistic variation is also considered.

This paper proposes a new typology of predicates that serves as a basis for a general treatment of singular and plural noun phrases within generalized quantifier theory. Section 2 proposes that instead of the traditional distinction between "distributive ", "collective" and "mixed" predicates, a binary classification of predicates should be used according to their behaviour with plural determiners like all and exactly five. Predicates that allow collectivity with such determiners are referred to as

In this thesis, two requirements on Underspecified Representation Formalisms are investi-gated in detail in the context of underspecification of scope. The requirement on partial disambiguation, stating that partially disambiguated ambiguities need to be represented, does not carry much content unless it has become clear, exactly what those ambiguities are. In line with König and Reyle (1999), I argue that all theoretically possible patterns of ambiguity, i.e. subsets of readings, can occur in natural language and that therefore an underspecified representation formalism can only be regarded as expressively com-plete, if it provides representations for all of these subsets. This discussion is couched in a general formal setting, which facilitates clean definitions and allows for the derivation of formally precise results. With those formal definitions at hand, various underspeci-fied representation formalisms are evaluated. As it turns out, none of the investigated formalisms is expressively complete, which answers a corresponding question raised in (König and Reyle, 1999). These incompleteness results allow for a straightforward com-parison of the discussed approaches with respect to expressive power, which forms the

This dissertation was typeset in L ATEX by the author. The Arabic noun phrase A minimalist approach Een wetenschappelijke proeve op het gebied van de Letteren Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen op gezag van de Rector Magnificus, Prof. Dr. C. W. P. M. Blom, volgens besluit van het College van Decanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op maandag 16 juni 2003, des namiddags om 1.30 uur precies

In this paper we look at the interpretation of Quantifier Phrases from the perspective of Symmetric Categorial Grammar. We show how the apparent mismatch between the syntactic and semantic behaviour of these expressions can be resolved in a typelogical system equipped with two Merge relations: one for syntactic units, and one for the evaluation contexts of the semantic values associated with these syntactic units. Keywords:

This article studies the monotonicity behavior of plural determiners that quantify over collections. Following previous work, we describe the collective interpretation of determiners such as all, some and most using generalized quantifiers of a higher type that are obtained systematically by applying a type shifting operator to the standard meanings of determiners in Generalized Quantifier Theory. Two processes of counting and existential quantification that appear with plural quantifiers are unified into a single determiner fitting operator, which, unlike previous proposals, both captures existential quantification with plural determiners and respects their monotonicity properties. However, some previously unnoticed facts indicate that monotonicity of plural determiners is not always preserved when they apply to collective predicates. We show that the proposed operator describes this behavior correctly, and characterize the monotonicity of the collective determiners it derives. It is proved that determiner fitting always preserves monotonicity properties of determiners in their second argument, but monotonicity in the first argument of a determiner is preserved if and only if it is monotonic in the same direction in the second argument. We argue that this asymmetry follows from the conservativity of generalized quantifiers in natural language.