Two Papers from Winter

“Yoad Winter”:http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~winter/ has posted two new papers:

2003: “Functional Quantification”:http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~winter/papers/fq.pdf. To appear in Research on Language and Computation.

bq. This paper develops a unified analysis of “functional” anaphora and wide-scope indefinites. A new operator is added to Jacobson’s variable-free semantics of functional readings, which leads to an analysis of theses readings using the general Skolem function interpretation of wide-scope indefinites. This accounts for the distributional, technical and intuitive similarities between the two phenomena. Moreover, after formally characterizing the class of generalized quantifiers that are treated by the proposed mechanism, it is argued that this class is a good approximation of the quantifiers that empirically support functional readings.

2003: “On Scope Dominance with Monotone Quantifiers”:http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~winter/papers/sdmon.pdf. With Gilad Ben-Avi. To appear in Proceedings of MOL8.

bq. We characterize pairs of monotone generalized quantifiers Q1 and Q2 that give rise to an entailment relation between their two relative scope construals. This result is used for identifying entailment relations between the two scopal interpretations of simple sentences of the form NP1-V-NP2. The general characterization that we give turns out to cover more examples of such entailments besides the familiar type where the NPs are headed by some and every.