Flexibility Principles in Boolean Semantics: The Interpretation of Coordination, Plurality, and Scope in Natural Language

Winter, Yoad

doi:10.1162/089120102762672007

Cited by 58 publications

(115 citation statements)

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“…Quantifier Raising or QR, Chomsky, 1976;May, 1977;Quantifying-in, Montague, 1972;Rodman, 1976), semantic (e.g. Cooper storage, Cooper, 1983;Keller, 1988;type-shifting of expressions, Hendriks, 1988; type-shifting of composition rules, Barker, 2002) or involve a more complex mapping at the syntaxsemantics interface (e.g., a lexicalized grammar where different quantifier words have different scopal mechanisms, Beghelli & Stowell, 1997;Steedman, 2012; See also Reinhart, 1997;Winter, 2001). …”

Section: Theoretical Approaches To Quantifier Scopementioning

confidence: 99%

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The logic in language: How all quantifiers are alike, but each quantifier is different

Feiman

Snedeker

2016

Cognitive Psychology

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Quantifier words like EACH, EVERY, ALL and THREE are among the most abstract words in language. Unlike nouns, verbs and adjectives, the meanings of quantifiers are not related to a referent out in the world. Rather, quantifiers specify what relationships hold between the sets of entities, events and properties denoted by other words. When two quantifiers are in the same clause, they create a systematic ambiguity. "Every kid climbed a tree" could mean that there was only one tree, climbed by all, or many different trees, one per climbing kid. In the present study, participants chose a picture to indicate their preferred reading of different ambiguous sentences -those containing EVERY, as well as the other three quantifiers. In Experiment 1, we found large systematic differences in preference, depending on the quantifier word. In Experiment 2, we then manipulated the choice of a particular reading of one sentence, and tested how this affected participants" reading preference on a subsequent target sentence. We found a priming effect for all quantifiers, but only when the prime and target sentences contained the same quantifier. For example, ALL-A sentences prime other ALL-A sentences, while EACH-A primes EACH-A, but sentences with EACH do not prime sentences with ALL or vice versa. In Experiment 3, we ask whether the lack of priming across quantifiers could be due to the two sentences sharing one fewer word. We find that changing the verb between the prime and target sentence does not reduce the priming effect. In Experiment 4, we discover one case where there is priming across quantifiers -when one number (e.g. THREE) is in the prime, and a different one (e.g. FOUR) is in the target. We discuss how these findings relate to linguistic theories of quantifier meaning and what they tell us about the division of labor between conceptual content and combinatorial semantics, as well as the mental representations of quantification and of the abstract logical structure of language.

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Section: Theoretical Approaches To Quantifier Scopementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In contrast, splitting theories posit different scoping mechanisms for some or all different quantifiers (e.g. Beghelli and Stowell, 1997;Champollion, 2010;Fodor & Sag, 1982;Reinhart, 1997;Steedman, 2012;VanLehn, 1978;Winter, 2001 and many others).…”

Section: A Range Of Quantifier Scope Theoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The logic in language: How all quantifiers are alike, but each quantifier is different

Feiman

Snedeker

2016

Cognitive Psychology

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“…of type e, e , rather than functions from sets of individuals to their members, but since the domain of plural individuals and the domain of sets of individuals are isomorphic (cf. Van den Berg 1996;Landman 1989;Schwarzschild 1996;Winter 2001), it is not hard to recast everything proposed here in terms of choice functions from sets to their members. 8 Since it is routine to incorporate non-atomic distributive readings by referring to 'covers' (Schwarzschild 1996), I will ignore such readings throughout this paper for the sake of simplicity.…”

Section: Dependent Plural Pronouns With C-commanding Antecedentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dependent plural pronouns with Skolemized choice functions

Sudo

2014

Nat Lang Semantics

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The present paper discusses two interesting phenomena concerning phifeatures on plural pronouns: (i) plural pronouns that denote atomic individuals ('dependent plural pronouns'), and (ii) plural pronouns with more than one binder ('partial binding'). A novel account of these two phenomena is proposed, according to which all occurrences of phi-features are both semantically and morphologically relevant. For such a 'uniformly semantic account' of phi-features, dependent plural pronouns constitute a theoretical challenge, while partial binding is more or less straightforwardly accounted for. In order to make sense of the semantic effects of the phi-features on dependent plural pronouns, the following idea is pursued: the phi-features on a dependent plural pronoun reflect the range of values that the pronoun takes, rather than the particular value it denotes at a time. This idea is implemented in a compositional semantics by making use of (Skolemized) choice functions. An appealing feature of the present account is that, unlike its predecessors, it accounts for dependent plural pronouns without c-commanding antecedents in essentially the same way as for those with c-commanding antecedents. It is also shown how this account of dependent plural pronouns can straightforwardly be augmented with set indices to account for partial binding.

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“…This distinction between NPs where the CF analysis is available and other NPs where it is unavailable, is addressed by the syntactic semantic mechanism that is proposed in Winter (2000Winter ( , 2001a, and I will not discuss it further here.…”

Section: Wide-scope Indefinitesmentioning

confidence: 99%