FW: Today: DIP on the occasion Henk Zeevat's retirement
Zuidema, Jelle
________________________________________
From: p.m....@uva.nl [p.m....@uva.nl]
Sent: Friday, June 22, 2018 9:19 AM
To: illc
Subject: Today: DIP on the occasion Henk Zeevat's retirement
Today, Friday, 22 June, we will have a very special DiP Colloquium. On the occasion
of his retirement, Henk Zeevat will present new results on quantification in natural
language. As always, a reception will follow. We hope to see you there!
Speaker: Henk Zeevat (UvA, retirement)
Title: Interpreting Dependent NPs
Date: Friday 22 June 2018
Time: 16:00 - 17:30
Location: ILLC seminar room F1.15
The Salish language Stat'imc'ets does not allow quantifiers within the scope of
other quantifiers. There is only a cumulative reading in such cases, i.e. "every boy
saw 5 birds" is true if every boy saw a bird and the total number of birds seen was 5.
This can be modeled in frame semantics, in semantic dependency graphs (SDG, the
semantic representation language used in the talk) or in certain versions of event
semantics by a projection semantics: the projection of the reported events by the
thematic role experiencer gives all the boys and its projection by the thematic role
theme the 5 observed birds. Cumulative readings, also claimed to be the default
readings in many cases for English sentences with two NPs, are simple in such
frameworks and complex in semantic representation formalisms based on
Mostowski's generalised quantifiers., like Montague grammar or DRT -which can be
seen as an argument in favour of the first and against the latter style of semantic
representation.
Stat'imc'ets has however a separate morphological class of dependent NPs
(ku+noun) that must be licensed by other quantifiers.
These behave as NPs in the scope of their licensing quantifier and reconstructing
that meaning in SDG in the standard way is complex and unintuitive.
It is however possible to interpret the dependent NPs directly as functions that map
the denotation of their licensing NP to normal NP values.
This preserves the projection properties of the licensing NP and turns out to be just
as feasible for English, in which any NP can be in the scope of another quantifier.
Possessive NPs are a plausibkle source for the reanalysis that makes them into
dependent NPs and thus for a historical account of the possibility orf one NP being
in the scope of another.
The resulting approach makes a number of things remarkably easy.
1. It gives a markedness order over the different readings of NP V NP sentences in
which overt marking and absurdity pushes the interpreter to the least marked
interpretation of the sentence, instead of the 64 readings standardly assumed in
the worst case.
2. The mixed cumulative quantificational cases noted by Barry Schein fall out of the
process described in 1.
3. The dependent anaphora that motivated Martin van den Berg's dissertation get a
trivial analysis.
4. Branching quantifiers likewise fall out of the process given in 1.
5. The disharmony in the head noted by Zwicky disappears (there is no longer
something that can be called the semantic head)
6. Free choice items can be interpreted simply and naturally
7. In recent work, Viola Schmitt has shown that all conjunction gives rise to
cumulative readings -and consequently that a Boolean approach is just wrong for
natural language conjunction. Boolean behaviour can however be restored by
making the conjunction dependent on other conjunctions and the same markers
(each, both) that force dependency between NPs are used.
8. Dependency also seems the right way for an analysis of negative polarity items.
But this is work for the future.
As indicated, the analysis of quantification proposed has applications beyond
natural language. The paper shows that in natural language semantics, it has a
strong typological and semantic underpinning. The notion of projection as a
semantic operation is still central and as such also the proposed analysis of
quantification makes a strong case for frame semantics, SDG or (certain kinds of)
event semantics.