Wide Scope Readings Research Articles

Scopal Independence: A Note on Branching and Wide Scope Readings of Indefinites and Disjunctions

Hintikka claimed in the 1970s that indefinites and disjunctions give rise to 'branching readings' that can only be handled by a 'game-theoretic' semantics as expressive as a logic with (a limited form of) quantification over Skolem functions. Due to empirical and methodological difficulties, the issue was left unresolved in the linguistic literature. Independently, however, it was discovered in the 1980s that, contrary to other quantifiers, indefinites may scope out of syntactic islands. We claim that branching readings and the island-escaping behaviour of indefinites are two sides of the same coin: when the latter problem is considered in full generality, a mechanism of 'functional quantification' (Winter 2004) must be postulated which is strictly more expressive than Hintikka's, and which predicts that his branching readings are indeed real, although his own solution was insufficiently general. Furthermore, we suggest that, as Hintikka had seen, disjunctions share the behaviour of indefinites, both with respect to island-escaping behaviour and (probably) branching readings. The functional analysis can thus naturally be extended to them.

In Defense of a Quantificational Account of Definite DPs

Two types of arguments support a quantificational view of definite DPs. First, definite DPs share properties with other quantified expressions. In particular, they pattern together in antecedent-contained deletion constructions, they show weak crossover effects, and at least some of them interact scopally with other quantified expressions. Second, the apparent failure of (some) definite DPs to interact scopally with other quantified expressions and to exhibit island effects stems from two properties of definite DPs: they are all principal filters, and the witness set of singular definite DPs is a singleton. These two properties have the effect of rendering the wide and narrow scope readings of definite DPs indistinguishable.

On Linkhood, Topicalization and Clitic Left Dislocation

This paper focuses on the Information Packaging notion of linkhood and provides a structural definition of this notion for Greek. We show that a combination of structural resources – syntactic (left dislocation), morphological (clitic duplication) and phonological (absence of nuclear accent) – are simultaneously exploited to realize linkhood in Greek, a generalization that can be captured in a constraint-based grammar such as HPSG, which permits the expression of interface constraints. We assume Vallduví's (1992) approach to Information Packaging, and Engdahl & Vallduví's (1996) implementation of the latter in HPSG, but deviate from Vallduví's work in adopting Hendriks & Dekker's (1996) revised definition of linkhood that relies on non-monotone anaphora. From an empirical point of view, our approach directly accounts for the invariable association of Clitic Left Dislocated NPs with wide scope readings, as well as a number of systematic differences in felicity conditions between Clitic Left Dislocation and other apparently related phenomena (Topicalization and Clitic Doubling). From a theoretical perspective, our analysis departs from syntax-based notions of topichood or discourse-linking and supports a definition that unifies linkhood with other anaphora phenomena. As such, it arguably overcomes previously noted problems for Vallduví's treatment of links as the current-locus-of-update in a Heim-style file-card system.

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

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.

Referential and quantificational indefinites

The formal semantics that we have proposed for definite and indefinite descriptions analyzes them both as variable-binding operators and as referring terms. It is the referential analysis which makes it possible to account for the facts outlined in Section 2, e.g. for the purely ‘instrumental’ role of the descriptive content; for the appearance of unusually wide scope readings relative to other quantifiers, higher predicates, and island boundaries; for the fact that the island-escaping readings are always equivalent to maximally wide scope quantifiers; and for the appearance of violations of the identity conditions on variables in deleted constituents. We would emphasize that this is not a random collection of observations. They cohere naturally with each other, and with facts about other phrases that are unambigously referential. We conceded at the outset of this paper that the referential use of an indefinite noun phrase does not, by itself, motivate the postulation of a referential interpretation. Our argument has been that the behavior of indefinites in complex sentences cannot be economically described, and certainly cannot be explained, unless a referential interpretation is assumed. It could be accounted for in pragmatic terms only if the whole theory of scope relations and of conditions on deletion could be eliminated from the semantics and incorporated into a purely pragmatic theory. But this seems unlikely.