An analysis of (a) different as in every child watched a different movie is developed that is based on an analysis of indefinites in terms of Skolemised choice functions. The internal reading of the sentence, which expresses that the movies covary with the children, is analysed as stating that the children can be mapped injectively to movies they watched. This is achieved by letting the Skolemised choice function that interprets the indefinite pick, for each child, an element from the set of movies that the same function does not assign to any other individual, which allows for analysing different in a manner parallelling ordinary intersective adjectives. Simply replacing this set of movies with the set of contextually salient movies then also gives the external reading. An implementation at the syntax-semantics interface is provided, employing Lexical Resource Semantics.
The paper shows how the plural semantic
ideas of (Sternefeld, 1998) can be captured in Lexical Resource
Semantics, a system of underspecied semantics. It is argued that
Sternefeld's original approach, which allows for the unrestricted
insertion of pluralisation into Logical Form, suffers from a problem
originally pointed out by Lasersohn (1989) with respect to the analysis
offered by Gillon (1987). The problem is shown to stem from repeated
pluralisation of the same verbal argument and to be amenable to a
simple solution in the proposed lexical analysis, which allows for
restricting the pluralisations that can be inserted. The paper further
develops an account of maximalisation of pluralities as needed to
obtain the correct readings for sentences with quantiers that are not
upward monotone. Such an account is absent in the orginal system in
(Sternefeld, 1998). The present account makes crucial use of the
possibility to have distinct constituents contribute identical semantic
material offered by LRS and employs it in an analysis of maximalisation
in terms of polyadic quantication.
This paper points out
certain flaws in the semantics for lexical rule specifications
developed in Meurers (2001). Under certain circumstances, certain
words may not be licit inputs to a rule according to this semantics
while one would expect them to be from inspecting the specification of
the rule. The reasons for this are shown to be that whether properties
of paths should be transferred from the input of a rule to its output
is decided considering only the respective paths and their properties
in isolation, ignoring the ‘non-local’ effects that transferring their
properties can have. Furthermore, the semantics is insensitive to the
possible shapes of inputs to the rule, which also makes it possible
that inputs of certain shapes are unexpectedly not accepted. An
alternative semantics is developed that does not suffer from these
deficits.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.