Brasoveanu, Adrian 2008. Deictic and Sentence-Internal Readings of Same / Different as Anaphora: A Unified Compositional Account

to appear in the Proceedings of What Syntax Feeds Semantics? (ESSLLI 2008 Workshop).

The paper proposes the first unified account of deictic and sentence-internal readings of same/different.
The analysis is executed in a stack-based dynamic system and it is fully compositional because the system
is couched in classical type logic. The main proposal is that distributive quantification temporarily makes
available two discourse referents within its nuclear scope, the values of which are required by sentence-
internal uses of same/different to be identical/distinct – much as their deictic uses require the values of
two discourse referents to be identical/distinct. The system is independently motivated by quantificational
subordination, the availability of both dependent and independent readings for anaphora in the scope of
each and, finally, dependent indefinites in various languages. Thus, same and different provide further
support for the idea that natural language quantification is a composite notion, to be analyzed in terms of
discourse reference to dependencies that is multiply constrained by the various components that make up
a quantifier.

This paper focuses on the formal aspects of the problem. For a cross-linguistic survey and more discussion
of the empirical issues, see
Sentence-Internal Readings of Same / Different as Quantifier-Internal Anaphora,
to appear in the Proceedings of the 27th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics