Languages that have determiners often have a rich inventory of them. In English, indefinite determiners include a(n), some, a certain, this, one, another, cardinals, partitives, the zero determiner of bare plurals (in some analyses), and, according to Horn 1999 and Giannakidou 2001, any. Despite the attention indefinites have

We propose that the antecedent of a donkey pronoun takes scope over and binds the donkey pronoun, just like any other quantificational antecedent would bind a pronoun. We flesh out this idea in a grammar that compositionally derives the truth conditions of donkey sentences containing conditionals and relative clauses, including those involving modals and proportional quantifiers. For example, an indefinite in the antecedent of a conditional can bind a donkey pronoun in the consequent by taking scope over the entire conditional. Our grammar manages continuations using three independently motivated type-shifters, Lift, Lower, and Bind. Empirical support comes from donkey weak crossover (*He beats it if a farmer owns a donkey): in our system, a quantificational binder need not c-command a pronoun that it binds, but must be evaluated before it, so that donkey weak crossover is just a special case of weak crossover. We compare our approach to situation-based E-type pronoun analyses, as well as to dynamic accounts such as Dynamic Predicate Logic. A new ‘tower ’ notation makes derivations considerably easier to follow and manipulate than some previous grammars based on continuations.

In the 1980’s, the analysis of presupposition projection contributed to a ‘dynamic turn’ in semantics: the classical notion of meanings as truth conditions was replaced with a dynamic notion of meanings as Context Change Potentials (Heim 1983). We explore an alternative in which presupposition projection follows from the combination of a fully classical semantics with two pragmatic principles of manner, Be Articulate and Be Brief. Be Articulate is a violable constraint which requires that a meaning pp’, conceptualized as involving a precondition p (its ‘presupposition’), should be articulated as … (p and pp’) … (e.g. … it is raining and John knows it…) rather than as … pp ’. Be Brief, which is more highly ranked than Be Articulate, disallows a full conjunction whose first element is semantically idle. In particular,... (p and pp’)... is ruled out by Be Brief- and hence … pp ’ … is acceptable despite Be Articulate- if one can determine as soon as p and is uttered that no matter how the sentence ends these words could be eliminated without affecting its contextual meaning. Two equivalence theorems guarantee that these principles derive Heim’s results in almost all cases. Unlike dynamic semantics, our analysis does not encode in the meaning of connectives the left-right asymmetry which is often found in presupposition projection; instead, we give a flexible analysis of this incremental bias, which allows us to account for some ‘symmetric readings ’ in which the bias is overridden (e.g. If the bathroom is not hidden,

This paper presents some arguments against a unilateral account of numerically quantified noun phrases and for a bilateral account of such expressions. It is proposed that where numerically quantified noun phrases give rise to ‘at least ’ readings, this is the result of one of two forms of pragmatic reasoning. To that end, the paper develops an independently motivated account of specificity and existential closure involving diagonalisation.

The experiment reported here is aimed at investigating a phenomenon known as “quantifier spreading”. I will primarily focus on the so-called classic spreading illustrated in (1) and (2).

This paper studies some newly observed phenomena with indefinite descriptions when they appear as complements of prepositional phrases (PPs). We show that in many such cases the indefinite does not receive the traditional existential interpretation, and its quantificational force is sensitive to the identity of the preposition. Such cases of quantificational variability are explained by elaborating previous theories of semantic incorporation. In our proposal, predicative indefinites are direct arguments of the spatial component in the semantics of the PP. The semantics of spatial prepositions is directly responsible for the quantificational interpretation of predicative indefinites that appear as PP complements. Using earlier studies of locative prepositions, especially (Zwarts and Winter 2000), we analyze the effects that monotonicity and (anti-)additivity of prepositions have on the quantificational interpretation of predicative indefinites in their complement. These semantic observations are supported by standard tests from entailments and acceptability with negative polarity items. 1.

Abstract not found

Many people have noted that sentences like (1) are, in a certain sense, ambiguous. (1) Every miner went to a meeting. It seems that (1) can mean either that there was one meeting that every miner went to, or that every miner went to at least one meeting with no guarantee that they all went to the same meeting. In the language of first-order logic we can represent these two readings as a matter of the universal and existential quantifiers having different scope with respect to each other: (2) ∀x∃y miner(x) ∧ meeting(y) ∧ went(x, y) (3) ∃y∀x miner(x) ∧ meeting(y) ∧ went(x, y) It is well-known that first-order logic can capture the ambiguities of some natural lan-guage sentences by varying scope. If all we are interested in is finding some mode of representing various ambiguities of natural language, we could stop at this observation.

Abstract not found

Abstract not found