Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS
Ambiguity and Anaphora with Plurals in Discourse
Nicholas Asher & Linton Wang
We provide examples of plurals related to ambiguity and anaphora that pose problems
or are counterexamples for current approaches to plurals. We then propose a dynamic
semantics based on an extension of dynamic predicate logic (DPL+) to handle these
examples. On our theory, different readings of sentences or discourses containing plurals
don't arise from a postulated ambiguity of plural terms or predicates applying to
plural DPs, but follow rather from different types of dynamic transitions that manipulate
inputs and outputs from formulas or discourse constituents. Many aspects of
meaning can affect the type dynamic transitions: the lexical semantics of predicates to
the left and right of a transition, and number features of DPs and discourse constraints
like parallelism.
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Posted by Tony Marmo
at 01:01 BST
Updated: Thursday, 16 September 2004 05:26 BST
