Abstract
In this paper I revive two important formal approaches to the interpretation of natural language, that of Montague and that of Karttunen and Peters. Armed with insights from dynamic semantics (Heim, Krifka) the two turn out to stand up against age-old criticisms in an orthodox fashion. The plan is mainly methodological, as I only want to illustrate the technical feasibility of the revived proposals. Even so, there are illuminating and welcome empirical consequences on the subject of scope islands (as discussed by Abusch and Kratzer, among many others), as well as unintended theoretical implications in the contextualist debate (Grice, Recanati, Simons, Stanley, and many others again).
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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
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Dekker, P. A multi-dimensional treatment of quantification in extraordinary English. Linguist and Philos 31, 101–127 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-008-9034-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-008-9034-1
Keywords
- Semantics
- Pragmatics
- Quantification
- Dynamic interpretation
- Scope islands