Equational-intensional relative clauses with syntactic representation

Abstract

Analyses of scope reconstruction typically fall into two competing approaches: ‘semanticreconstruction’, which derives non-surface scope using semantic mechanisms, and ‘syntacticreconstruction’, which derives it by positing additional syntactic representations at thelevel of Logical Form. Grosu and Krifka (2007) proposed a semantic-reconstruction analysisfor relative clauses like the gifted mathematician that Dan claims he is, in which the relativehead NP can be interpreted in the scope of a lower intensional quantifier. Their analysis relieson type-shifting the relative head into a predicate of functions. We develop an alternativeanalysis for such relative clauses that replaces type-shifting with syntactic reconstruction. Thecompeting analyses diverge in their predictions regarding scope possibilities in head-externalrelative clauses. We use Hebrew resumptive pronouns, which disambiguate a relative clausein favor of the head-external structure, to show that the prediction of syntactic reconstructionis correct. This result suggests that certain type-shifting operations are not made available byUniversal Grammar.Keywords: relative clauses, scope, reconstruction, type-shifting, de dicto, intensional quantifiers,binding, resumptive pronouns.

Restricting the fourth reading

“…Crucially, all three utterances do not discuss actual judges, and only the fourth reading is true. Our analysis does not posit any mechanism not already assumed by Bassi & Rasin (2018). In fact, the only novel contribution in this section is the observation that Grosu & Krifka's RC in (14), analyzed by Bassi & Rasin, is just a special case of a larger class of RCs; namely, fourth reading RCs.…”

“…The literature on reconstruction into RCs is too vast to be reviewed here, and we refer the reader to a summary of arguments in support of reconstruction in Bhatt (2002: 46-56). In our account below, we use the semantics for reconstructed RCs proposed by Bassi & Rasin (2018), in the spirit of Heim's (2018) analysis of functional readings of questions. 3 The starting point for Bassi & Rasin is an ambiguity detected by Grosu & Krifka (2007) in examples like ( 14).…”