Treating Quantifiers in Database Semantics
Jae-Woong Choe, Roland Hausser · 2006
This paper analyzes the syntactic and semantic structure of noun phrases in English and Korean, using the time-linear derivations of Database Semantics.1 In comparison with Predicate Calculus, which handles the semantics of determiners like some and all at the highest level of the logical syntax, Database Semantics takes the alternative approach of specifying their semantics as atomic values in the feature structures representing noun phrases. This not only avoids well-known difficulties of the classical approach, such as unwanted scope ambiguities (Copestake et al. 2001) and problems binding certain variables (Geach 1969, Kamp & Reyle 1993), but also opens the way to concentrate on important linguistic aspects of complex noun phrases, namely agreement in English, and the alternative word orders and the rather free distribution of case markers inside the NP in Korean. Given that the internal structure of Japanese NPs is very similar to that of Korean, we believe that our analysis can be easily extended to include Japanese as well. 1 Interpretation of Quantifiers in Predicate Calculus Since Russell’s 1905 celebrated analysis of definite descriptions in terms of predicate calcu-