[New at the Semantics Archive]

Chris Barker. Parasitic Scope. [“This is a rough draft of July 2, 2004 based on my SALT 14 talk at Northwestern University on 15 May 2004.”]

bq. Keenan (1992) proves there is no generalized quantifier that expresses the meaning the same two books. And indeed, previous analyses of adjectives like same have been heavily pragmatic (Dowty 1985, Beck 2000) or else deliberately noncompositional, either building syntactically discontinuous higherorder quantifiers (Keenan 1992, van Eijck 2003), or relying on side calculations (Stump 1982, Moltmann 1992). Building on insights of Carlson (1987), I propose the first strictly compositional semantic account of same. New data, including especially NP-internal uses such as two men with the same name, suggests that same is a quantificational element taking scope over nominals. Given lift as a basic type-shifting operator, I show that this proposal follows naturally from the fact that same is an adjective. Independently motivated assumptions extend the analysis to standard examples such as Anna and Bill read the same book via a mechanism I call parasitic scope, in which the scope of same depends on the scope of some other scope-taking element in the sentence. Although I initially express the main analysis within a movement-based framework with Quantifier Raising in the style of Heim and Kratzer (1998), I go on to implement the analysis within a continuation-based, variable-free, directly compositional combinatory-categorial grammar, without Quantifier Movement or any use of Logical Form distinct from surface structure. The empirical payoff for dealing in continuations is that a simple generalization accounts for the first time for cases in which same distributes over objects other than NP denotations, as in the relevant interpretation of John hit and killed the same man.