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The Grammar of Quantification

Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1977)

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  1. Combining Montague semantics and discourse representation.Reinhard Muskens - 1996 - Linguistics and Philosophy 19 (2):143 - 186.
    This paper embeds the core part of Discourse Representation Theory in the classical theory of types plus a few simple axioms that allow the theory to express key facts about variables and assignments on the object level of the logic. It is shown how the embedding can be used to combine core analyses of natural language phenomena in Discourse Representation Theory with analyses that can be obtained in Montague Semantics.
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  • Free choice and the theory of scalar implicatures* MIT,.Danny Fox - manuscript
    This paper will be concerned with the conjunctive interpretation of a family of disjunctive constructions. The relevant conjunctive interpretation, sometimes referred to as a “free choice effect,” (FC) is attested when a disjunctive sentence is embedded under an existential modal operator. I will provide evidence that the relevant generalization extends (with some caveats) to all constructions in which a disjunctive sentence appears under the scope of an existential quantifier, as well as to seemingly unrelated constructions in which conjunction appears under (...)
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  • Logical Form: Between Logic and Natural Language.Andrea Iacona - 2018 - Cham, Switzerland: Springer Verlag.
    Logical form has always been a prime concern for philosophers belonging to the analytic tradition. For at least one century, the study of logical form has been widely adopted as a method of investigation, relying on its capacity to reveal the structure of thoughts or the constitution of facts. This book focuses on the very idea of logical form, which is directly relevant to any principled reflection on that method. Its central thesis is that there is no such thing as (...)
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  • Towards a variable-free semantics.Pauline Jacobson - 1999 - Linguistics and Philosophy 22 (2):117-185.
    The Montagovian hypothesis of direct model-theoretic interpretation of syntactic surface structures is supported by an account of the semantics of binding that makes no use of variables, syntactic indices, or assignment functions & shows that the interpretation of a large portion of so-called variable-binding phenomena can dispense with the level of logical form without incurring equivalent complexity elsewhere in the system. Variable-free semantics hypothesizes local interpretation of each surface constituent; binding is formalized as a type-shifting operation on expressions that denote (...)
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  • Interpreted Logical Forms.Richard K. Larson & Peter Ludlow - 1993 - Synthese 95 (3):305 - 355.
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  • Referential and quantificational indefinites.Janet Dean Fodor & Ivan A. Sag - 1982 - Linguistics and Philosophy 5 (3):355 - 398.
    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 (...)
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  • Situations in natural language semantics.Angelika Kratzer - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Situation semantics was developed as an alternative to possible worlds semantics. In situation semantics, linguistic expressions are evaluated with respect to partial, rather than complete, worlds. There is no consensus about what situations are, just as there is no consensus about what possible worlds or events are. According to some, situations are structured entities consisting of relations and individuals standing in those relations. According to others, situations are particulars. In spite of unresolved foundational issues, the partiality provided by situation semantics (...)
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  • The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology.Herman Cappelen, Tamar Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.) - 2016 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...)
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  • Choice functions and the scopal semantics of indefinites.Yoad Winter - 1997 - Linguistics and Philosophy 20 (4):399-467.
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  • Negative polarity and grammatical representation.Marcia C. Linebarger - 1987 - Linguistics and Philosophy 10 (3):325 - 387.
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  • Syntax, More or Less.John Collins - 2007 - Mind 116 (464):805-850.
    Much of the best contemporary work in the philosophy of language and content makes appeal to the theories developed in generative syntax. In particular, there is a presumption that—at some level and in some way—the structures provided by syntactic theory mesh with or support our conception of content/linguistic meaning as grounded in our first-person understanding of our communicative speech acts. This paper will suggest that there is no such tight fit. Its claim will be that, if recent generative theories are (...)
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  • Demonstratives as individual concepts.Paul Elbourne - 2008 - Linguistics and Philosophy 31 (4):409-466.
    Using a version of situation semantics, this article argues that bare and complex demonstratives are interpreted as individual concepts.
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  • Anaphora and dynamic binding.Gennaro Chierchia - 1992 - Linguistics and Philosophy 15 (2):111--183.
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  • Distributivity and negation: The syntax of each and every.Filippo Beghelli & Tim Stowell - 1997 - In Anna Szabolcsi (ed.), Ways of Scope Taking. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 71--107.
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  • Quantifying In from a Fregean Perspective.Seth Yalcin - 2015 - Philosophical Review 124 (2):207-253.
    As Quine observed, the following sentence has a reading which, if true, would be of special interest to the authorities: Ralph believes that someone is a spy. This is the reading where the quantifier is naturally understood as taking wide scope relative to the attitude verb and as binding a variable within the scope of the attitude verb. This essay is interested in addressing the question what the semantic analysis of this kind of reading should look like from a Fregean (...)
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  • Elucidations of meaning.James Higginbotham - 1989 - Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (4):465 - 517.
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  • Donkey pluralities: plural information states versus non-atomic individuals.Adrian Brasoveanu - 2008 - Linguistics and Philosophy 31 (2):129-209.
    The paper argues that two distinct and independent notions of plurality are involved in natural language anaphora and quantification: plural reference (the usual non-atomic individuals) and plural discourse reference, i.e., reference to a quantificational dependency between sets of objects (e.g., atomic/non-atomic individuals) that is established and subsequently elaborated upon in discourse. Following van den Berg (PhD dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 1996), plural discourse reference is modeled as plural information states (i.e., as sets of variable assignments) in a new dynamic system (...)
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  • The proper treatment of variables in predicate logic.Kai F. Wehmeier - 2018 - Linguistics and Philosophy 41 (2):209-249.
    In §93 of The Principles of Mathematics, Bertrand Russell observes that “the variable is a very complicated logical entity, by no means easy to analyze correctly”. This assessment is borne out by the fact that even now we have no fully satisfactory understanding of the role of variables in a compositional semantics for first-order logic. In standard Tarskian semantics, variables are treated as meaning-bearing entities; moreover, they serve as the basic building blocks of all meanings, which are constructed out of (...)
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  • Ways of Scope Taking.Anna Szabolcsi (ed.) - 1997 - Kluwer Academic Publishers.
    Ways of Scope Taking is concerned with syntactic, semantic and computational aspects of scope. Its starting point is the well-known but often neglected fact that different types of quantifiers interact differently with each other and other operators. The theoretical examination of significant bodies of data, both old and novel, leads to two central claims. (1) Scope is a by-product of a set of distinct Logical Form processes; each quantifier participates in those that suit its particular features. (2) Scope interaction is (...)
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  • Scope and comparatives.Richard K. Larson - 1988 - Linguistics and Philosophy 11 (1):1 - 26.
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  • Crossover Situations.Daniel Büring - 2004 - Natural Language Semantics 12 (1):23-62.
    Situation semantics as conceived in Kratzer (1989) has been shown to be a valuable companion to the e-type pronoun analysis of donkey sentences (Heim 1990, and recently refined in Elbourne 2001b), and more generally binding out of DP (BOOD; Tomioka 1999; Büring 2001). The present paper proposes a fully compositional version of such a theory, which is designed to capture instances of crossover in BOOD.
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  • Paycheck Pronouns, Bach-Peters Sentences, and Variable-Free Semantics.Pauline Jacobson - 2000 - Natural Language Semantics 8 (2):77-155.
    This paper argues for the hypothesis of direct compositionality (as in, e.g., Montague 1974), according to which the combinatory syntactic rules specify a set of well-formed expressions while the semantic combinatory rules work in tandem to directly supply a model-theoretic interpretation to each expression as it is "built" in the syntax. (This thus obviates the need for any level like LF and, concomitantly, for any rules mapping surface structures to such a level.) I focus here on one related group of (...)
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  • Interpreting logical form.Robert May - 1989 - Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (4):387 - 435.
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  • Cross-linguistic semantics.Maria Bittner - 1994 - Linguistics and Philosophy 17 (1):53 - 108.
    Rooth & Partee (1982) and Rooth (1985) have shown that the English-specific rule-by-rule system of PTQ can be factored out into function application plus two transformations for resolving type mismatch (type lifting and variable binding). Building on these insights, this article proposes a universal system for type-driven translation, by adding two more innovations: local type determination for gaps (generalizing Montague 1973) and a set of semantic filters (extending Cooper 1983). This system, dubbed Cross-Linguistic Semantics (XLS), is shown to account for (...)
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  • Split intensionality: a new scope theory of de re and de dicto.Ezra Keshet - 2010 - Linguistics and Philosophy 33 (4):251-283.
    The traditional scope theory of intensionality (STI) (see Russell 1905; Montague 1973; Ladusaw 1977; Ogihara 1992, 1996; Stowell 1993) is simple, elegant, and, for the most part, empirically adequate. However, a few quite troubling counterexamples to this theory have lead researchers to propose alternatives, such as positing null situation pronouns (Percus 2000) or actuality operators (Kamp 1971; Cresswell 1990) in the syntax of natural language. These innovative theories do correct the undergeneration of the original scope theory, but at a cost: (...)
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  • The genetics of language.Lyle Jenkins - 1979 - Linguistics and Philosophy 3 (1):105 - 119.
    Within the context of the study of the genetics of language, Chomskian laws of grammar, such as theStructure-dependence Condition and theA over A Condition, may be usefully regarded to have a status similar to that of Mendelian Laws in classical genetics. In both the case of Chomsky's Laws and Mendel's Laws, formal genetic principles are postulated which abstract away from the physical mechanisms involved and in both cases certain apparent counterexamples mirror a more complex underlying genetic organisation.
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  • Semantics with Assignment Variables.Alex Silk - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    This book combines insights from philosophy and linguistics to develop a novel framework for theorizing about linguistic meaning and the role of context in interpretation. A key innovation is to introduce explicit representations of context — assignment variables — in the syntax and semantics of natural language. The proposed theory systematizes a spectrum of “shifting” phenomena in which the context relevant for interpreting certain expressions depends on features of the linguistic environment. Central applications include local and nonlocal contextual dependencies with (...)
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  • (1 other version)Mass and count quantifiers.Jim Higginbotham - 1994 - Linguistics and Philosophy 17 (5):447 - 480.
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  • Reciprocals and Same/Different: Towards a Semantic Analysis.Friederike Moltmann - 1992 - Linguistics and Philosophy 15 (4):411 - 462.
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  • On Logical Form.Danny Fox - 2003 - In Randall Hendrick (ed.), Minimalist Syntax. Blackwell. pp. 82-123.
    A Logical Form (LF) is a syntactic structure that is interpreted by the semantic component. For a particular structure to be a possible LF it has to be possible for syntax to generate it and for semantics to interpret it. The study of LF must therefore take into account both assumptions about syntax and about semantics, and since there is much disagreement in both areas, disagreements on LF have been plentiful. This makes the task of writing a survey article in (...)
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  • Coordination and Comparatives.Friederike Moltmann - 1992 - Dissertation, MIT
    This thesis explores the syntax and semantics of coordinate structures on the basis of three-dimensional syntactic structures. In particular it gives an analysis of sentences of the sort 'a man came and a woman left who knew each other well' on the basis of implicit coordination of NPs, made available within three-dimensionional syntactic structures..
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  • (1 other version)Formal Semantics: Origins, Issues, Early Impact.Barbara H. Partee - 2011 - The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 6:13.
    Formal semantics and pragmatics as they have developed since the late 1960's have been shaped by fruitful interdisciplinary collaboration among linguists, philosophers, and logicians, among others, and in turn have had noticeable effects on developments in syntax, philosophy of language, computational linguistics, and cognitive science.In this paper I describe the environment in which formal semantics was born and took root, highlighting the differences in ways of thinking about natural language semantics in linguistics and in philosophy and logic. With Montague as (...)
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  • The loss of uniqueness.Szabó Zoltán Gendler - 2005 - Mind 114 (456):1185 - 1222.
    Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory ‘Russellian’ just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in ‘On Denoting’. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in Russell's writings. As far as the semantics of descriptions is concerned, the key insights of ‘On Denoting’ are that definite descriptions are not uniformly referring expressions, and that they are scope-bearing elements. Anyone who accepts these two (...)
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  • Resolution of quantifier scope ambiguities.Howard S. Kurtzman & Maryellen C. MacDonald - 1993 - Cognition 48 (3):243-279.
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  • Implicit arguments in situation semantics.Richard K. Larson - 1988 - Linguistics and Philosophy 11 (2):169 - 201.
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  • Children's command of quantification.Jeffrey Lidz & Julien Musolino - 2002 - Cognition 84 (2):113-154.
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  • Concealed causatives.Maria Bittner - 1999 - Natural Language Semantics 7 (1):1-78.
    Crosslinguistically, causative constructions conform to the following generalization: If the causal relation is syntactically concealed, then it is semantically direct. Concealed causatives span a wide syntactic spectrum, ranging from resultative complements in English to causative subjects in Miskitu. A unified type-driven theory is proposed which attributes the understood causal relation—and other elements of constructional meaning—to type lifting operations predictably licensed by type mismatch at LF. The proposal has far-reaching theoretical implications not only for the theory of compositionality and causation, but (...)
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  • Distributivity in Chiense and its Implications.Jo-Wang Lin & Fred Landman - 1998 - Natural Language Semantics 6 (2):201-243.
    This paper gives an analysis of the Chinese distributivity marker dou 'all', which can occur not only with definite plural NPs but also with NPs whose determiner is a quantifier word such as mei 'every' or dabufen-de 'most'. Besides normal distributive predicates, it can also occur with certain types of collective predicates. The difficulties of giving a compositional interpretation to constructions of these kinds are discussed in detail. I show that we can solve those difficulties if we treat dou as (...)
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  • Structured propositions.Arnim von Stechow - unknown
    0. SOME THESES .................................................................................................... ...............................................3..
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  • Logical form and conditions on grammaticality.William A. Ladusaw - 1983 - Linguistics and Philosophy 6 (3):373 - 392.
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  • Scope and binding.Anna Szabolcsi - 2011 - In von Heusinger, Maienborn & Portner (eds.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning, Vol. 2. de Gruyter Mouton.
    The first part of this article (Sections 1–5) focuses on the classical notions of scope and binding and their formal foundations. It argues that once their semantic core is properly understood, it can be implemented in various different ways: with or without movement, with or without variables. The second part (Sections 6–12) takes up the empirical issues that have redrawn the map in the past two decades. It turns out that scope is not a primitive. Existential scope and distributive scope (...)
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  • Inverse linking via function composition.Gregory M. Kobele - 2010 - Natural Language Semantics 18 (2):183-196.
    The phenomenon of inverse linking, where a noun phrase embedded within another behaves with respect to binding as though it were structurally independent, has proven challenging for theories of the syntax–semantics interface. In this paper I show that, using an LF-movement style approach to the syntax–semantics interface, we can derive all and only the appropriate meanings for such constructions using no semantic operations other than function application and composition. The solution relies neither on a proliferation of lexical ambiguity nor on (...)
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  • Definite Descriptions and Quantifier Scope: Some Mates Cases Reconsidered.Michael Glanzberg - 2007 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 3 (2):133-158.
    This paper reexamines some examples, discussed by Mates and others, of sentences containing both definite descriptions and quantifiers. It has frequently been claimed that these sentences provide evidence for the view that definite descriptions themselves are quantifiers. The main goal of this paper is to argue this is not so. Though the examples are compatible with quantificational approaches to definite descriptions, they are also compatible with views that treat definite descriptions as basically scopeless. They thus provide no reason to see (...)
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  • Split-scope definites: Relative superlatives and Haddock descriptions.Dylan Bumford - 2017 - Linguistics and Philosophy 40 (6):549-593.
    This paper argues for a particular semantic decomposition of morphological definiteness. I propose that the meaning of ‘the’ comprises two distinct compositional operations. The first builds a set of witnesses that satisfy the restricting noun phrase. The second tests this set for uniqueness. The motivation for decomposing the denotation of the definite determiner in this way comes from split-scope intervention effects. The two components—the selection of witnesses on the one hand and the counting of witnesses on the other—may take effect (...)
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  • The distribution of quantificational suffixes in Japanese.Kazuko Yatsushiro - 2009 - Natural Language Semantics 17 (2):141-173.
    The existential and universal quantifiers in Japanese both consist of two morphemes: an indeterminate pronoun and a quantificational suffix. This paper examines the distributional characteristics of these suffixes (ka for the existential quantifier and mo for the universal quantifier). It is shown that ka can appear in a wider range of structural positions than mo can. This difference receives explanation on semantic grounds. I propose that mo is a generalized quantifier. More specifically, I assume that the phrase headed by mo (...)
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  • Events and “logical form”.Stephen Neale - 1988 - Linguistics and Philosophy 11 (3):303 - 321.
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  • Licensing of PPI indefinites: Movement or pseudoscope?Vincent Homer & Rajesh Bhatt - 2019 - Natural Language Semantics 27 (4):279-321.
    Positive Polarity indefinites, such as some in English, are licensed in simplex negative sentences as long as they take wide scope over negation. When it surfaces under a clausemate negation, some can in principle take wide scope either by movement or by some semantic mechanism; e.g., it can take pseudoscope if it is interpreted as a choice function variable. Therefore, there is some uncertainty regarding the way in which PPI indefinites get licensed: can pseudoscope suffice? In this article we show, (...)
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  • Quantifier scope: How labor is divided between QR and choice functions. [REVIEW]Tanya Reinhart - 1997 - Linguistics and Philosophy 20 (4):335-397.
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  • Move and accommodate: A solution to Haddock's puzzle.Lucas Champollion - unknown
    What licenses the use of a definite description? The formal and philosophical literature has approached this question in two ways. The uniqueness approach (Frege, 1892; Russell, 1905; Strawson, 1950) holds that we may use a definite determiner only if the property denoted by its complement holds of exactly one individual in some domain: Sentence (1) and (2) can only be true if there is exactly one king of France, and exactly one American governor, respectively. Since this is not the case (...)
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  • Cross-linguistic semantics for questions.Maria Bittner - 1998 - Linguistics and Philosophy 21 (1):1-82.
    : The Hamblin-Karttunen approach has led to many insights about questions in English. In this article the results of this rule-by-rule tradition are reconsidered from a crosslinguistic perspective. Starting from the type-driven XLS theory developed in Bittner (1994a, b), it is argued that evidence from simple questions (in English, Polish, Lakhota and Warlpiri) leads to certain revisions. The revised XLS theory then immediately generalizes to complex questions — including scope marking (Hindi), questions with quantifiers (English) and multiple wh-questions (English, Hindi, (...)
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