Whence Long-Distance Indefinite Readings? Solving Chierchia’s Puzzle with Dependent Types

Grudzinska, Justyna; Zawadowski, Marek

doi:10.1007/978-3-662-54332-0_3

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“…Dependent type theoretical frameworks (Martin-Löf 1975;Martin-Löf and Sambin 1984;Makkai 1995) have been used to model linguistic phenomena of central importance, e.g., unbound anaphora (Ranta 1994;Fernando 2001;Cooper 2004;Grudzińska and Zawadowski 2014;Bekki 2014), lexical phenomena such as selectional restrictions and coercions (Asher 2011;Luo 2012;Chatzikyriakidis and Luo 2017b), adjectival and adverbial modification (Chatzikyriakidis and Luo 2017a) and long-distance indefinites (Grudzińska and Zawadowski 2017d). This paper argues that the three puzzling readings (inversely linked interpretations, weak definite readings in possessives and Haddock-type readings) provide another compelling example of application of dependent types to the study of natural language semantics.…”

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confidence: 99%

Inverse Linking, Possessive Weak Definites and Haddock Descriptions: A Unified Dependent Type Account

Grudzinska

Zawadowski

2019

J of Log Lang and Inf

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This paper proposes a unified dependent type analysis of three puzzling phenomena: inversely linked interpretations, weak definite readings in possessives and Haddocktype readings. We argue that the three problematic readings have the same underlying surface structure, and that the surface structure postulated can be interpreted properly and compositionally using dependent types. The dependent type account proposed is the first, to the best of our knowledge, to formally connect the three phenomena. A further advantage of our proposal over previous analyses is that it offers a principled solution to the puzzle of why both inversely linked interpretations and weak definite readings (in contrast to Haddock-type readings) are blocked with certain prepositions.

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