We study several cases of functional anaphora in natural language, that is, cases in which there is a functional correlation between individuals in the domain, introduced in the form of two nested quantifi ers "For every x there is an y . . ." followed by anaphorical references to any pair instantiating the two quantifi ers. After discussing the impossibility of contemporary dynamic theories to deal with this phenomenon, we review some of the main approaches which have tried to address this problem. We end up with some considerations on the representation of quantifi ers and anaphora and with some prospects for further work. Functional dependence in natural languageThe standard view according to which indefi nites in natural language are to be assimilated to existential quantifi ers functions approximatively well if evidence is restricted to sentences like (1) Every man reads a book.It has been often observed that this sentence is ambiguous between two readingscorresponding to the indefi nite having a "narrow" or "wide scope" with respect to the quantifi ed NP 'every man'. The indefi nites as existential quantifi ers view seem to account for this phenomenon, for it is only of a quantifi er or of an operator that it makes sense to say that it is in the scope of another. Problems appear, however, as soon as anaphorical pronouns are involved. For in this case, on the traditional view which regards the relation Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/24/16 8:15 PM 610 Gabriel Sandu and Justine Jacot between an anaphor and its head as one of coreference, one is enclined to view(2) A man smiles. He is happy . as involving the same semantical scheme as(3) John smiles. He is happy .A uniform account of the two NP's in the subject position would then treat both of them referentially, with coreference indicated, as ususal, by an identity statement between two terms or by the pronoun being represented by a copy of its head. In fact, this is the way in which indefi nites are treated in one of the most popular semantic theories born in the early eighties, in both of its versions: Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp 1981) and File Semantics (Heim 1982). Discourse Representation TheoryDRT fi rst converts each of the two sentences into a Discourse Representation Structure ( DRS ), a syntactic entity consisting of reference markers and conditions. Both the indefi nite "A man" and the proper name "John" introduce a reference marker, that is, a free variable, say x . Later on, when "He" is processed, a new reference marker is introduced, say y , together with an identity statement x = y (a condition) which indicates the resolution of anaphora. The fi nal DRSs corresponding to (2) and (3) are respectively: D 2 : ({x,y}, {man(x), smiles(x), happy(y), x = y}) D 3 : ({x,y}, { John(x) , smiles(x), happy(y), x = y})We have a quasi-referential view of indefi nites: they are free variables, and so are anaphorical pronouns. This view has the advantage, over the indefinites as existential quantifi ers view, that a free variable is in principle ...
We examine a special case of inquiry games and give an account of the informational import of asking questions. We focus on yes-or-no questions, which always carry information about the questioner's strategy, but never about the state of Nature, and show how strategic information reduces uncertainty through inferences about other players' goals and strategies. This uncertainty cannot always be captured by information structures of classical game theory. We conclude by discussing the connection with Gricean pragmatics and contextual constraints on interpretation.
The Barth-Krabbe-Hintikka-Hintikka Problem, independently raised by Barth and Krabbe (From axiom to dialogue: a philosophical study of logics and argumentation. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1982) and Hintikka and Hintikka (The sign of three: Peirce, Dupin, Holmes. In: Eco U, Sebeok TA (eds) Sherlock Holmes confronts modern logic: Toward a theory of information-seeking through questioning. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1983), is the problem of characterizing the strategic reasoning of the players of dialogical logic and game-theoretic semantics games from rational preferences rather than rules. We solve the problem by providing a set of preferences for players with bounded rationality and specifying strategic inferences from those preferences, for a variant of logical dialogues. This solution is generalized to both game-theoretic semantics and orthodox dialogical logic (classical and intuitionistic).
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