Indefinites and Scope Choice
Ruth Kempson, Wilfried Meyer-Viol · 2004
Abstract Ever since the early 1980s, there has been recognition that the intrinsic contribution of a natural language expression systematically under-determines the way it is interpreted in any given context. In the initial part of this period, there were fierce debates between Fodor and situation theorists, principally Barwise (see Fodor 1981, 1983, 1987; Barwise and Perry 1983; Barwise 1988) as to whether this phenomenon should be modeled relative to the assumption that languages are directly interpreted (much as the familiar formal languages, though with an enriched semantic vocabulary), or rather only indirectly with an intermediary process mapping such strings into some form of representation (for Fodor some ‘language of thought’) which is transparent with respect to such interpretation and nontrivially distinct from the natural-language string itself.