Underspecified semantics
| Abstract | Ambiguities in natural language can multiply so fast that no person or machine can be expected to process a text of even moderate length by enumerating all possible disambiguations. A sentence containing n scope bearing elements which are freely permutable will have n! readings, if there are no other, say lexical or syntactic, sources of ambiguity. A series of m such sentences would lead to (n!)m possibilities. Some alternative scopings may boil down to the same reading. The relative order in which we scope two existentially quantified noun phrases, for example, will not matter if no other material intervenes. But all in all the growth of possibilities will be so fast that generating readings first and testing their acceptability afterwards will not be feasible. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,709 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Only published papers are available at libraries |
Similar books and articlesP. Schlenker (2006). Scopal Independence: A Note on Branching and Wide Scope Readings of Indefinites and Disjunctions. Journal of Semantics 23 (3):281-314.
M. Egg (1998). Wh-Questions in Underspecified Minimal Recursion Semantics. Journal of Semantics 15 (1):37-82.
Anna Szabolcsi (1997). Introduction to Ways of Scope Taking. In Anna Szabolcsi (ed.), Ways of Scope Taking. Kluwer.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads20 ( #61,609 of 549,753 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,425 of 549,753 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
