Distributives, quanti flers and a multiplicity of events

Abstract

With the intention of indicating some temporal/event-theoretic characteristics of distributive clauses, a generalisation is made over distributives and clauses marked for iterative aspect: two kinds of semantic phenomena which have normally been confined to separate theoretical domains. It is shown that in particular, both give rise to an 'inferential set construction' problem. An informal outline is given of what might constitute such a generalisation. The generalisation is proposed intially on grounds of prima facie plausibility, but its ultimate defensibility and explanatory value will depend on the validity of its consequence, that distributive clauses entail a multiplicity of temporal entities or events. This proposal is considered with respect to two types" of discourse phenomena; anaphoric reference to event entities, and temporal binding. These provide further support for making the generalisation, clarify its nature and indicate in what respect the entailment claim can be true of distributives. The set construction problem is of practical importance for computational models of natural language interaction, and since the concept of iterated action is central to planning, the generalisation across iteration and distributives, along with the observations about their nature, have interesting implications for work in this area.