Brasoveanu, Adrian 2009.  Sentence-Internal Different as Quantifier-Internal Anaphora

ms. that significantly revises and expands the WCCFL 27 and ESSLLI 2008 papers.

The paper proposes the first unified account of deictic / sentence-external and sentence-internal readings of singular different. The empirical motivation for such an account is provided by a cross-linguistic survey and an analysis of the differences in distribution and interpretation between the English singular different, plural different and same (be it singular or plural). 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 singular different to be distinct, much as its deictic uses require the values of two discourse referents to be distinct. The contrast between singular different, plural different and same is explained in terms of several kinds of quantificational distributors that license their internal readings. 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 account is independently motivated by quantificational subordination and dependent indefinites in various languages. All these phenomena provide support for the idea that natural language quantification is a composite notion, to be decomposed / analyzed in terms of discourse reference to dependencies that is multiply constrained by the various components that make up a quantifier.