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Kieran Britt Department of Linguistics Discourse Pragmatic Constraints On Kieran Britt Department of Linguistics Discourse Pragmatic Constraints on Quantifier Scope Ambiguity Undergraduate Honors Thesis Defended on April 13th, 2020 Thesis Advisor: Professor Laura Michaelis (Department of Linguistics) Honors Council Representative: Professor Jeremy Calder (Department of Linguistics) Outside Reader: Professor Graeme Forbes (Department of Philosophy) 1 Discourse Pragmatic Constraints on Quantifier Scope Ambiguity In this thesis, I argue that, in many contexts that appear likely to generate Quantifier Scope Ambiguity (QSA), certain apparently universal discourse pragmatic constraints that are attached to particular syntactic constructions prevent QSA from arising. These discourse pragmatic constraints broadly concern the scopal relations of topical and focal sentence constituents, and manifest at the level of the construction, preventing a sentence with either (a) a particular focus articulation, or (b) a particular construction, from being ambiguous. To understand the nature of the problem, consider the following sentences: (1) Someone talked to everyone at school.1 (2) Everyone at school talked to someone. What do these sentences mean? I think it is fairly uncontroversial that sentence 1 means something like, “there is a specific person who talked to everyone at school.” This is known as the surface reading, because the scope of the quantifiers matches the word order of the sentence. Represented in the language of first-order logic, this would be:2 (1a) (∃x) (Ɐy) Txy On the other hand, in the right context, one could interpret sentence 1 as saying, in regimented English, something like, “at least one person, but not necessarily the same person, talked to everyone at school.” This is known as the inverse reading. In first- order logic: (1b) (Ɐy) (∃x) Txy3 1 Both of these sentences actually exhibit a bracketing paradox, regarding the scope of ‘at school.’ For simplicity, I’ll be ignoring this in this example. 2 Here, I adopt the notation of Forbes 1994. Forbes calls this the some/all reading (Forbes 1994, p. 246.). 3 Forbes calls this the all/some reading (Forbes 1994, p. 246.). 2 Sentence 2, on the other hand, seems like it could mean either “Everyone at school talked to at least one person, not necessarily the same one” or “Everyone at school talked to the same specific person” In first-order logic: (2a) (Ɐx) (∃y) Txy (2b) (∃y) (Ɐx) Txy Sentences like those above are not the only class of cases where QSA occurs. On top of sentences like 1 and 2, similar QSA sentences can be generated with a variety of different quantifiers. Quantifier phrases like ‘many people’, ‘most people’, ‘all of the people’, ‘a person’, ‘the person’, ‘three people’, and others4 can be substituted for the quantifiers in sentences 1 and 2, generating (or occasionally not generating) different QSAs. In addition to this, both sentences 1 and 2 can undergo syntactic processes like passivization, which can affect QSAs. QSA can also occur, and interestingly fail to occur, across diathesis alternations in ditransitive sentences. And sentences with multiple quantifiers are not the only ones that can generate QSA (multiple-quantifier ambiguities); it can also occur between a quantifier and a negation operator (quantifier- negation ambiguities), such as in the sentence: (3) John didn’t eat a cookie. Which either means, “There is a cookie that John didn’t eat.” or “There are no cookies that John ate.” depending on the context in which the sentence is said, and the prosody with which it is said. There are certainly other contexts where QSA can occur. But the point is that QSA is a surprisingly frequent occurrence, despite not being noticed by most native speakers. Why are these sentences ambiguous, and why does this ambiguity go generally unnoticed by most speakers? In this paper, I’m going to try to provide a partial answer to these questions by way of answering a related question: why are some putative QSA sentences not ambiguous, despite their syntactic and semantic similarity to the questions above? Ultimately, I will argue that the answer to this question is that certain 4 While my examples here involve persons/people, they obviously can be extended to include all sorts of other nouns, such as ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘dog’, ‘cat’, ‘chair’, etc. 3 discourse pragmatic constraints—both universal and construction specific—prevent QSA from arising in a wide range of cases. While this won’t explain why these ambiguities arise (assuming this is a well-formed question, which is debatable) or how they are resolved, it will narrow the classes of cases which can be said to genuinely exhibit QSA. The rest of this work will be structured as follows. Section 1 will discuss some important preliminaries for understanding this work, including the methodology I will adopt, and the theoretical assumptions I will be operating under as I investigate QSA. I will also provide a brief introduction to the discourse pragmatic framework I will be assuming that will do the most work in my analysis. In section 2, I will investigate some of the previous work that has been done which is relevant to QSA, and analyze the cases in which a sentence ought to exhibit QSA, but no QSA occurs. In section 3, I will synthesize these results, providing an account of the discourse pragmatic constraints that prevent QSA. I will summarize my findings and conclude in section 4. In the appendix, I will take a brief look at how my account may be implemented in the formal semantic system provided by event-semantic Type-Logical Grammar. The appendix will be more technical, and is not required for an understanding of the core details of my account. 1. Preliminaries 1.1 Some Notes on the Methodology of this Work Before diving into my analysis of QSA, I must clear up a number of methodological issues. This paper is a work in theoretical linguistics, and as such, it will not rely overmuch on empirical methods of study. Rather, this work will proceed through analysis of the semantics, syntax, and pragmatics of English sentences, either of my own creation or that I draw from various sources. The interpretation of these sentences and their grammaticality/felicity will thus rely on my own intuitions as a native speaker of English, as well as the intuitions of the linguists whose data I have drawn from. The rigor in this work will be drawn from the synthesis of the sources from which I draw my data, as well as the mathematical rigor of my implementation of my findings in a formal semantics system. 4 The semantic/syntactic framework that will be adopted for this paper is by and large the theoretical framework Neo-Davidsonian event semantics implemented in Type-logical Grammar, an offshoot of Montague grammar that addresses some of the key problems that Montague grammar faced.5 Despite this, real attention will be given to the linguistic findings of both Chomskyan linguists and construction grammarians, and ultimately, it will be argued that discourse pragmatic constraints which affect semantic derivation relevant to QSA exist primarily at the level of construction, rather than at the lexical or syntactic levels. The formal semantics of the examined phenomena will be derived using type-logical grammar into event semantics using the simple theory of types, and the existence of a model-theoretic semantics for this derivation will be presumed. I will provide an overview of the discourse pragmatic theory I will be utilizing in the next section. In order to keep this paper within a reasonable length, I must sidestep many interesting linguistic and philosophical issues. First, I will be treating ‘a’, ‘the’, and numerals such as ‘two’ or ‘three’ as quantifiers. Second, by and large I will be ignoring the theoretical issues posed by definite descriptions, though certain discourse pragmatic features of definite descriptions will be accounted for. Third, this paper will ignore the interesting and unique QSAs which are generated in intensional contexts.6 Fourth, while I am partial to the analysis of modal and temporal operators in terms of quantification over worlds/times, analogues to QSA with respect to modal and temporal operators will not be addressed here. Fifth, even though QSA is a particular puzzle within the more general issue of quantifier scope, I will not attempt to give a complete analysis of quantifier scope here, and will thus be ignoring certain issues surrounding quantifier scope and bound anaphora (the notorious donkey sentences, for example). In doing so, I will be avoiding the analysis of sentences that require Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) or an equivalent to be given formalization.7 Finally, in order to prevent this 5 The account of Type-Logical grammar which I will adopt is, in general, that of Forbes 2017. I will also be adopting some of the more technical apparatus of Forbes 2015. 6 Forbes 2006, pp. 36-51, Pietroski and Hornstein 2002, p. 23-39, and Steedman 2012, p. 50-51, all give examples of these, and discuss them. 7 Steedman 2012 gives this topic a proper treatment, and argues against DRT. Gamut 1994, p. 264-297 gives an overview of DRT and Dynamic Logic. 5 project from ballooning to an unreasonable length, I will be forced to be fairly strict about the classes of sentences (in terms of constructions) that I will investigate. There is an important distinction, discussed by Pietroski and Hornstein, between syntactic ambiguity and openness to semantic interpretation (Pietroski and Hornstein 2002, p. 1-4). Roughly speaking, ambiguity is a syntactic notion, involving different possible scopal relations of constituents in a sentence. But sentences that admit of no ambiguity can be true on multiple interpretations. Pietroski and Hornstein (2002) argue that sentences which putatively exhibit QSA and are headed by ‘strong determiners’ (each, every, both, etc.), like ‘Everyone pushed a truck’ in fact are not ambiguous, merely open to interpretation.
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