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Optionality, Scope, and Licensing: An Application of Partially Ordered Categories

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Abstract

This paper uses a partially ordered set of syntactic categories to accommodate optionality and licensing in natural language syntax. A complex but well-studied data set pertaining to the syntax of quantifier scope and negative polarity licensing in Hungarian is used to illustrate the proposal. The presentation is geared towards both linguists and logicians. The paper highlights that the main ideas can be implemented in different grammar formalisms, and discusses in detail an implementation where the partial ordering on categories is given by the derivability relation of a calculus with residuated and Galois-connected unary operators.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano, 39100, Italy

    Raffaella Bernardi

  2. Department of Linguistics, New York University, 726 Broadway, Rm. 726, New York, NY, 10003, USA

    Anna Szabolcsi

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  1. Raffaella Bernardi
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  2. Anna Szabolcsi
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Correspondence to Raffaella Bernardi.

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Bernardi, R., Szabolcsi, A. Optionality, Scope, and Licensing: An Application of Partially Ordered Categories. J of Log Lang and Inf 17, 237–283 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10849-008-9060-y

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