Structured anaphora to quantifier domains: A unified account of quantificational and modal subordination

Abstract

The paper proposes an account of the contrast (noticed in [9]) between the interpretations of the following two discourses: Harvey courts a girl at every convention. {She is very pretty, vs. She always comes to the banquet with him.}. The initial sentence is ambiguous between two quantifier scopings, but the first discourse as a whole allows only for the wide-scope indefinite reading, while the second allows for both. This cross-sentential interaction between quantifier scope and anaphora is captured by means of a new dynamic system couched in classical type logic, which extends Compositional DRT ([16]) with plural information states (modeled, following [24], as sets of variable assignments). Given the underlying type logic, compositionality at sub-clausal level follows automatically and standard techniques from Montague semantics become available. The paper also shows that modal subordination (A wolf might come in. It would eat Harvey first) can be analyzed in a parallel way, i.e. the system captures the anaphoric and quantificational parallels between the individual and modal domains argued for in [23]. In the process, we see that modal/individual-level quantifiers enter anaphoric connections as a matter of course, usually functioning simultaneously as both indefinites and pronouns. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.