Decompositional composition: The semantics of scope ambiguities and ?bracketing paradoxes?

Abstract

The assumption that attribute phrases like nuclear physicist constitute a bracketing paradox which may be resolved by special rules such as head rules, rebracketing rules, and productive backformation has gone unchallenged for more than a decade. This paper argues that such structural solutions do not work, since the same scope problems are reflected in phrases based on underived words with no morphological bracketing at all. In their place, a solution based on decompositional or featural composition is proposed, in which attributes compose semantically not with the full set of features of their head, but rather with only one particular feature. This solution reduces the wide and narrow scope readings of attribute phrases to a question of which feature is selected, in effect making all attribute composition the same and obviating the distinction between wide and narrow scope readings of attribute phrases.