Variable Binding and Sets of Alternatives

Romero, Maribel; Novel, Marc

doi:10.1057/9781137317247_7

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 13 publications

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“…This entails that such binders are focus-semantic interveners. Although attempts have been made to make Predicate Abstraction compatible with Hamblin-style alternative semantics (see, for instance, Romero & Novel 2013), I follow Kotek (2016) and retain the use of variables but simultaneously assume that Shan's observation about alternative semantics is valid. In other words, I assume that (38) is indeed a general constraint on semantic composition.…”

Section: ] Iff λ Is Derived By Trace Conversionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting rebinding: an alternative to MaxElide

Griffiths

2019

NLY

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Using Takahashi & Fox (2005) as an exemplar, this paper argues that analyses of English ellipsis that make recourse to a MaxElide constraint (or a theoretical reduction thereof) are misguided, and that one must look past MaxElide to explain the distribution of acceptability in the elliptical rebinding constructions that MaxElide was originally invoked to explain. A novel analysis is outlined which attributes the unacceptability observed in the rebinding dataset to an inability to satisfy a more restrictive, reflexive version of Takahashi & Fox's (ibid.) Parallelism condition on ellipsis recoverability.

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Section: ] Iff λ Is Derived By Trace Conversionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting rebinding: an alternative to MaxElide

Griffiths

2019

NLY

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On Jacobson’s “Towards a Variable-Free Semantics”

Charlow

2012

Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy

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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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Variable Binding and Sets of Alternatives

Cited by 7 publications

References 13 publications

Revisiting rebinding: an alternative to MaxElide

Revisiting rebinding: an alternative to MaxElide

On Jacobson’s “Towards a Variable-Free Semantics”

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

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