Structured anaphora to quantifier domains

Abstract

The paper proposes a novel analysis of quantificational subordination, e.g., Harvey courts a woman at every convention.She is very pretty. vs. She always comes to the banquet with him. — in particular of the fact that the indefinite in the initial sentence can have wide or narrow scope, but the first discourse as a whole allows only for the wide scope reading, while the second discourse allows for both readings. The cross-sentential interaction between scope and anaphora is captured in terms of structured anaphora to quantifier domains, formalized in a new dynamic system couched in classical type logic that builds on the Dynamic Plural Logic of van den Berg [9]. Given the underlying type logic, compositionality at sub-clausal level follows automatically. Modal subordination is analyzed in a parallel way, thereby capturing the parallels between the individual and modal domains repeatedly argued for in the literature. We also outline the analysis of several other phenomena in terms of structured anaphora: exceptional scope, weak/strong donkey readings, anaphoric/uniqueness-implying definite descriptions and interactions between same / different and quantifier scope.