Abstract
It is a well known problem of on-line parsing that quantified NPs, in particular indefinites, may be interpreted as giving rise to logical forms in which they have a scope very different from that indicated by the surface sequence of expressions in which they occur — a problem which cannot be reduced to positing referential uses of indefinites; cf. (Farkas, 1981; Abusch, 1994). Various computational and formal systems have tackled this ambiguity problem, either, as is familiar, by positing processes of restructuring or storage (Montague, 1974; Cooper, 1983; May, 1985; Morrill, 1994; Pereira, 1990), or by building underspecified structures including unscoped or partially scoped representations of quantified NPs (Alshawi & Crouch, 1992; Reyle, 1993; Pereira & Pollack, 1991). In all of these cases, there is implicit recognition that the determination of scope choice is not incremental, but can only be defined once the total structure is complete. In this chapter we propose that the interpretation of indefinite NPs involves an anaphoric-like dependency, in which the indefinite is lexically projected as involving a dependent name for which the anchor of the dependency has to be chosen online. The dependency is represented by an indexing on the name, the index indicating the expression to which the dependent element is to be anchored.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abusch, D. (1994) The scope of indefinites. Natural Language Semantics 2 (2), 83–135.
Alshawi, H. & Crouch, R. (1992) Monotonic semantic interpretation, in Proceedings 30th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, 32–38.
Blackburn, S. & Meyer Viol, W. (1994) Linguistics, logic and finite trees. Bulletin of Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logics 2 (1), 3–29.
Cooper, R. (1983) Quantification and Syntactic Theory. Dordrecht: Reidel.
da Costa, N. C. (1980) A model-theoretic approach to variable binding term operators. In: A. I. Aruda, R. Chuaqui, N. C. da Costa (1980) Mathematical Logic in Latin America. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company.
Farkas, D. (1981) Quantifier scope and syntactic islands. Chicago Linguistic Society 17th Meeting, 59–66.
Farkas, D. (1997) Indexical scope. In: A. Sczabolsci (1997) Ways of Scope-Taking. Dordrecht: Reidel, 183–216.
Finger, M. & Gabbay, D. (1993) Adding a temporal dimension to a logical system. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 1, 203–33.
Finger, M., Kibble, R., Kempson, R. & Gabbay, D. (forthc.) Parsing natural language using LDS: a prototype. Bulletin of Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logics.
Gabbay, D. (1996) Labelled Deductive Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gabbay, D. & Kempson, R. (1992) Natural language content: a proof-theoretic perspective. Proceedings of 8th Amsterdam Semantics Colloquium. Amsterdam, 173–96.
Joshi, A. & Kulick, S. (forthc.) Partial proof trees as building blocks for a categorial grammar. Linguistics and Philosophy.
Kempson. R., Meyer Viol, W. & Gabbay, D. (forthc.) Syntactic computation as labelled deduction. In: R. Borsley, & I. Roberts, Syntactic Categories. New York: Academic Press.
May, R. (1985) Logical Form. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Meyer Viol, W. (1995) Instantial Logic. Utrecht: PhD dissertation.
Milward, D. (1993) Dynamics, dependency grammar and incremental interpretation. COLING 14, 1095–9.
Montague, R. (1974) Formal Philosophy. Yale: Yale University Press.
Morrill, G. (1994) Type-logical Grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Oehrle, R. (1995) Term-labelled categorial type systems. Linguistics & Philosophy 17.6, 633–78.
Pereira, F. (1990) Categorial semantics and scoping. Computational Linguistics 16, 1–10.
Pereira, F. & Pollack, M. (1991) Incremental interpretation. Artificial Intelligence 50, 37–82.
Reyle, U. (1993) Dealing with ambiguities by underspecification. Journal of Semantics 10, 123–79.
Shieber, S., Schabes, Y. & Pereira, F. (1995) Principles and implementation of deductive parsing. Journal of Logic Programming 24 (1–2), 3–36.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Viol, W.M. (1999). Indefinites as Epsilon Terms: A Labelled Deduction Account. In: Bunt, H., Muskens, R. (eds) Computing Meaning. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 73. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4231-1_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4231-1_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-0290-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-011-4231-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive