Assigning a semantic scope to operators

Abstract

I propose that the characteristics of the scope disamhiguation process observed in the literature can be explained in terms of the way in which the model of the situation described by a sentence is built. The model construction procedure I present builds an eventstructure by identifyingthe situations associated with the operators in the sentence and their mutual dependency relations, as well as the relations between these situations and other situations in the context. The procedure takes into account lexical semantics and the result of various discourse interpretation procedures such as definite description interpretation, and does not require a complete disambiguation to take place.