Justyna Grudzinska

Previous research has indicated that abstract grammatical rules and forms fall short of predicting quantifier scope and that lexical/pragmatic knowledge plays a significant part in quantifier scope disambiguation (QSD). More recent works have argued that world knowledge in the form of relations among objects may be salient to QSD. This paper contributes to this line of research by providing support to the claim that there is a connection between our lexical knowledge about preposition meanings and quantifier scope. More specifically, we propose that certain prepositional senses encode dependency relations that have an effect on scope-taking preferences. For example, the preposition of expressing ‘part-whole sense’ contributes to our choice of the inverse scope reading for the construction a day of every month by introducing a dependency between wholes (months) and their respective parts (days). Quantifying over this dependency yields the inverse scope reading: for every month, there is a different day that belongs to it (every month > a day). Furthermore, universal quantification in locative and temporal prepositional phrases tends to support inverse scope. For example, the locative preposition on — as in a store on each side of the street — implies ‘disjointness’ (objects do not occupy more than one place at a time), and hence can be interpreted as a dependency between each side of the street and the respective stores located on them. Quantifying over this dependency yields the inverse scope reading: for each side of the street, there is a different store located on it (each side of the street > a store). For studying the connection between prepositional senses and quantifier scope in the wild, we use a scope-disambiguated corpus created by AnderBois et al. ( 2012), additionally annotated with prepositional senses using the Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses (SNACS) scheme proposed in Schneider et al. ( 2018, 2020). The results of the corpus study combined with psycholinguistic experiments support the claim made here that certain prepositional senses are strong predictors of quantifier scope.

This paper proposes a unified dependent type analysis of three puzzling phenomena: inversely linked interpretations, weak definite readings in possessives and Haddock-type 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 are blocked with certain prepositions.

In my paper I focus on the linguistic phenomenon of multiple quantification. My aim is to defend the grammatical ambiguity hypothesis, the view that a multiple quantified sentence of a language L is semantically ambiguous if a grammar for L (understood as the cognitive mechanism that maps sentences onto meanings) encodes a class of interpretations - specifies the space of possible interpretations of that sentence. I argue both against the position of a unitary semantics: ambiguous sentences encode a single sense, a pragmatic (context dependent) derivation is essential in arriving at the other interpretations; and against that of radical pragmatics: ambiguous sentences encode no senses at all, a pragmatic derivation is essential in arriving at any interpretation (at all). In my attempt at providing a plausible account of semantic ambiguity, I use a combination of approaches and methods: theories of grammar (such as Government and Binding Theory), tools of mathematical logic, linguistic studies and the results of psycholinguistic experiments