Brasoveanu, Adrian 2007. Structured Anaphora to Quantifier Domains: A Unified Account of Quantificational and Modal Subordination, to appear in the Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Computation.
The
paper proposes an account of the contrast (noticed in Karttunen 1976)
between the interpretations of the following two discourses: Harvey courts a girl at every convention. {She is very pretty. vs. She always comes to the banquet with him.}.
The initial sentence is ambiguous between two quantifier scopings, but
the first discourse as a whole allows only for the wide-scope
indefinite reading, while the second allows for both. This
cross-sentential interaction between quantifier scope and anaphora is
captured by means of a new dynamic system couched in classical type
logic, which extends Compositional DRT (Muskens 1996) with plural
information states (modeled, following van den Berg 1996, as sets of
variable assignments). Given the underlying type logic,
compositionality at sub-clausal level follows automatically and
standard techniques from Montague semantics become available. The paper
also shows that modal subordination (A wolf might come in. It would eat Harvey first)
can be analyzed in a parallel way, i.e. the system captures the
anaphoric and quantificational parallels between the individual and
modal domains argued for in Stone (1999) (among others). In the
process, we see that modal / individual-level quantifiers enter
anaphoric connections as a matter of course, usually functioning
simultaneously as both indefinites and pronouns.