Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type‐Shifting Principles

doi:10.1002/9780470751305.ch10

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…(cf. also Partee's (1986) type-shifter IDENT) and in assuming that indefinite NPIs generate alternatives (cf. Krifka 1995, Chierchia 2013).…”

Section: Superlative Degree Clausesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first simply stores the current assignment together with the value of its complement in a singleton set (cf. Karttunen's (1977) ͠?͡ and Partee's (1986) IDENT, both used in section 4). The second is effectively a "nondeterministic" analogue of Heim and Kratzer's (1998) abstraction index: given a set of possible values G, it shifts the assignment at which its complement ␤ is evaluated once for each element of G. For comparison, the traditional abstractor is shown in (47c).…”

Section: A Simple Dynamic Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Negative Polarity Items in Definite Superlatives

Bumford

Sharvit

2022

Linguistic Inquiry

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Ordinary superlative descriptions are well-known to provide safe harbor to negative polarity items (NPIs), as in the longest book anyone read. What is less well-known is that relative superlative descriptions also sometimes host NPIs, as in the loudest that anyone sang. We observe that this latter pattern is more general than has been previously described. In fact, relative superlatives can license NPIs outside of their own descriptions. On the one hand, we argue that this provides evidence that the superlative adjectives take sentential rather than nominal scope. But on the other, following insights in Howard 2014, we argue that traditional semantic accounts of scope-taking superlatives do not present the right monotonicity profile to account for the NPIs either. A recent, dynamic take on superlative semantics (Bumford 2017) is shown to do better.

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“…(cf. also Partee's (1986) type-shifter IDENT) and in assuming that indefinite NPIs generate alternatives (cf. Krifka 1995, Chierchia 2013).…”

Section: Superlative Degree Clausesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Simple Dynamic Semanticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Negative Polarity Items in Definite Superlatives

Bumford

Sharvit

2022

Linguistic Inquiry

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Composition Under Distributive Natural Transformations: Or, When Predicate Abstraction is Impossible

Bumford

2022

J of Log Lang and Inf

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Natural language semanticists have often found it useful to assume that all expressions denote sets of values. The approach is most prominent in the study of questions and prosodic focus, but also common in work on indefinites, disjunction, negative polarity, and scalar implicature. However, the most popular compositional implementation of this idea is known to face technical obstacles in the presence of object-language binding constructs, including, chiefly, lambda abstraction. The problem has been well-described on several occasions in the literature, and in fact several solutions have been explored. This paper seeks to formalize the challenge of defining an indeterminate semantics for binding operators, and to formally establish the intuition that the challenge is in fact insurmountable. The primary benefit to this exercise is that it offers an abstract characterization of what it means to lift an operation from one semantic space to another, a notion which may be applied to domains having nothing to do with sets of alternatives.

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Not even

Collins

2016

Nat Lang Semantics

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Noun Phrase Interpretation and Type‐Shifting Principles

Cited by 5 publications

References 16 publications

Negative Polarity Items in Definite Superlatives

Negative Polarity Items in Definite Superlatives

Composition Under Distributive Natural Transformations: Or, When Predicate Abstraction is Impossible

Not even

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