Underspecification and interpretive parallelism in Dependent Type Semantics
Yusuke Kubota, Koji Mineshima, Robert D. Levine, Daisuke Bekki · 2019
The scope parallelism in the Geach sentence (Every boy loves, and every girl detests, some saxophonist) and the related parallel interpretation requirement in pronominal binding is a pervasive phenomenon found across different types of coordination and ellipsis phenomena.Previous accounts all resort to additional constraints of some sort that restrict the otherwise flexible syntax-semantics interface to avoid overgeneration.In this paper, we propose a novel approach to this long-standing problem.We show that, by taking a proof-theoretic perspective on natural language semantics and by viewing the ambiguity resolution for pronouns and indefinites as underspecification resolution that invokes extra proof search, a conceptually natural solution emerges for the problem of interpretive parallelism.The analysis is cast in Dependent Type Semantics, with Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar as the syntax-semantics interface backbone.For empirical illustration, we show how the proposed approach correctly accounts for the classical Geach paradigm and its pronominal variant.