Respectively interpretation and Binding Conditions A and B

Abstract

The theory of respectively interpretation proposed in Yatabe and Tam (2021) "In defense of an HPSG-based theory of non-constituent coordination" (Linguistics and Philosophy 44, pp. 1-77) entails that Binding Conditions A and B need to be formulated as constraints on the form of semantic representations. It is possible to formulate the two binding conditions as such constraints if anaphoric relations are encoded in semantic representations in a way analogous to the way they are encoded in Discourse Representation Theory.

Further evidence for an HPSG-based theory of the semantics of different and the same

“…In (27), for example, the antecedent of the reciprocal and the DP these six letters can receive cumulative interpretation, giving the sentence a reading in which it is true only if there are six letters such that each of those six letters was sent by one of the people to one of the others. This observation is incompatible with the theory proposed in Yatabe (2021), because in that theory the semantic antecedent of a reciprocal is taken to have the quantificational force of a distributive universal quantifier, which never gives rise to cumulative interpretation when associated with a grammatical subject position. Sentence (28), for instance, does not have a cumulative reading, i.e.…”

“…The theory presented in Yatabe (2021) does not take the existence of Distributed Strong Reciprocity into account, but we can easily rectify that shortcoming by modifying slightly the meaning assigned to the predicate other, which is used to express the meaning of reciprocals. Consider (9), which is the semantic representation assigned to sentence (8) in the theory under discussion.…”

“…The first thing that I need to do is to modify the meaning assigned to the silent distributive operators that are assumed to be responsible for the distributive readings of sentences like The residents wrote letters. In Yatabe (2021), the silent distributive operators, both the one that is assumed to be adjoined to a subjectseeking expression like a VP and the one that is assumed to be adjoined to a DP, are taken to have the quantificational force of a distributive universal quantifier, causing the problem just described. The new lexical entries that I now propose to associate with the two distributive operators are shown in Fig.…”

“…This paper is primarily about the semantics of words that give rise to the first type of internal reading, that is, the type of internal reading that is licensed by the presence of a plural antecedent. Yatabe (2021) presents a theory according to which one of the meanings of a word like different contains the meaning of a reciprocal pronoun inside it. In this theory, a sentence like (1) is associated with a semantic representation like (2) by mechanisms provided by HPSG and Minimal Recursion Semantics.…”

“…The analysis is thus not applicable to the apparent internal readings of sentences like (3) and (4), which do not contain a DP that could serve as the antecedent of different. Accordingly, it is claimed in Yatabe (2021) that the apparent internal readings of sentences like (3) and ( 4) are licensed in a way that is entirely different from the way in which the internal readings of sentences like (1) are licensed. I will refer to this claim as the non-uniformity claim about apparent internal readings.…”