“Philippe Schlenker”:http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/schlenker/. “Scopal Independence: On Branching & Island-Escaping Readings of Indefinites & Disjunctions”, first draft, UCLA & IJN.
bq. Abstract: Hintikka claimed in the 1970’s that indefinites and disjunctions give rise to ‘branching readings’ that can only be handled by a ‘game-theoretic’ semantics as expressive as a logic with quantification over Skolem functions. Due to empirical and methodological difficulties, the issue was left unresolved in the linguistics literature. Independently, however, it was discovered in the 1980’s that, contrary to other quantifiers, indefinites may scope out of syntactic islands. We claim that (i) branching readings and the island-escaping behavior of indefinites are two sides of the same coin: when the latter problem is considered in full generality, a mechanism of ‘functional quantification’ (Winter 1998, 2003) must be postulated which is strictly more expressive than Hintikka’s, and predicts that his branching readings are indeed real, although his own solution was insufficiently general. Furthermore, (ii) we show that, as Hintikka had seen, disjunctions share the behavior of indefinites, both with respect to island-escaping behavior and (probably) branching readings. The functional analysis can thus naturally be extended to them. Finally, (iii) we suggest that the functional analysis can and should be reinterpreted in terms of a mechanism of double quantification, according to which an indefinite may contribute (a) an existential quantifier which has narrow scope, but which (b) includes in its restrictor a definite description over identifying properties, i.e. properties which, given a certain number of individual arguments, hold true of exactly one object.
I have not looked into the paper yet, but, if Schlenker could reply to this post, I would like to know what Schlenker thinks of Han & Romero’s paper, ‘Disjunction, Focus, and Scope’(*) and of Hamblin approaches, like Kratzer [1,2,3&4].
*’This article presents the observation that disjunction cannot take wide scope in negative non-wh-questions and declaratives with a preposed negative element. This rules out the alternative question reading for non-wh-questions with preposed negation and the wide scope or reading for neg-inverted declaratives. We show that effects parallel to the ones associated with preposed negation can be reproduced in affirmative non-wh-questions and declaratives when focus is involved. We propose that preposed negation in non-wh-questions and preposed negative adverbials in declaratives necessarilycontribute focus marking (in particular, verum focus) and argue that the lack of wide scope disjunction reading in both declaratives and non-wh-questions results as a by-product of the interaction between focus and the LF syntax of disjunctive structures, which we argue involves ellipsis.’
June 2nd, 2004, at 4:07 am #