Continuations and Natural Language
Chris A. Barker, Chung-chieh Shan · 2014
Abstract The continuation of an expression is a portion of its surrounding context. This book proposes and defends the continuation hypothesis: that the meaning of a natural language expression can depend on its own continuation (it can denote a function on its surrounding context). Part I develops a continuation‐based theory of scope and quantificational binding. Taking inspiration from the theory of computer programming languages, and unlike other accounts of scope, continuations provide fine‐grained control over the order in which expressions are evaluated (processed). This leads to a principled yet nuanced explanation for sensitivity to order in scope‐related phenomena such as scope ambiguity, crossover, superiority, reconstruction, negative polarity licensing, dynamic anaphora, and donkey anaphora. Throughout Part I, concrete, explicit formal analyses are presented in a novel ‘tower’ format, which is designed to be easy to learn and easy to use, with diagrams, derivations, and detailed motivation and explanation. Part II develops an innovative substructural logic for reasoning about continuations. This enables an analysis of the notoriously challenging compositional semantics of adjectives such as “same” in terms of parasitic scope and recursive scope. In a separate investigation, certain cases of ellipsis are treated as anaphora to a continuation, leading to a new explanation for a subtype of sluicing known as sprouting. Attention is given throughout the book to the formal and computational properties of the analyses. Taken together, the empirical case studies support the conclusion that any complete and adequate theory of natural language meaning must recognize continuations as an essential explanatory element.