Citation
James J. Tyhurst, 1989-12-29. “A semantic characterization of referentially dependent noun phrases”. Presented at the 1989 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Washington, DC, December 27-30, 1989.
Abstract
Many syntactic and semantic studies have focused on the distribution of closed-class lexical NPs such as ‘her’, ‘herself’, and ‘each other’. Recent work has demonstrated that many other NPs are also referentially dependent (Carlson 1987, Keenan 1987). In this paper, I provide a model-theoretic semantic analysis of a number of referentially dependent NPs, including those below:
- Bob and Chris read a total of nine plays.
- Alice’s friends had two hobbies in common.
- Three students read the same books.
- Every student read a different book.
- Ashu’s parents speak related dialects of Denya.
- No students saw each other’s scores.
These NP are interpreted as functions which map two-place relations onto sets of properties. This analysis leads to two new and interesting results.
First, NPs may be classified according to their degree of dependency as specified by six semantic conditions on higher-order functions. This classification shows that English NPs cluster at points along an anaphor “squish”, in the sense of Ross (1972).
Second, distinctions made by these semantic conditions correlate with differences in syntactic distribution. For example, Strong and Weak Crossover effects are shown to generalize from bound variable pronouns to certain other classes of referentially dependent NPs. Unlike pronouns, these higher-order NPs appear to discriminate between crossover environments at S-structure and LF, as exemplified below:
* Which students did the same professor fail?
The same professor failed at least three students.