Advanced Syntactic Issues

Quantification / Scope
Long Distance Dependency
Accessibility
Binding and Control

Quantification / Scope

Every man loves a woman Two possible interpretations:

(i) For all x, man(x) ==> exits(y), woman(y) and love(x, y)

(ii) Exist y, woman(y) and for all x, man(x) ==> love(x, y)

The difference between these 2 interpretations comes from the relative scoping of the quantifiers (introduced by the determiner every and a). A simple compositional interpretation approach fails to capture this systematic ambiguity in quantifier scope. Cooper proposed a mechanism known as Cooper Quantifier Storage to allow a compositional treatment of quantifier scope ambiguity. (See Cooper, R., Quantification and Syntactic Theory, 1983, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, Netherlands.)

Long Distance Dependency

Consider the examples:

The man who _ likes Kim
The man who Kim likes _

The sign _ indicates a gap in the embedded syntactic constituent (the relative clause) which is filled by another NP from the containing constituent (the head of the NP).

Such structures can be recursively embedded - but there exist syntactic constraints on the location of gaps:

Which hypothesis did Kim deny that [Sandy had proved _ logically independent]?
* Which hypothesis did Kim leave for NY [before Sandy had proved _ logically independent]?

Accessibility

Not all scoping combinations are possible for a given syntactic construct. Consider the example:

(1) * A woman who saw every man disliked him.

(1) is not syntactically correct, while the following examples do have a possible interpretation:

(2) Every man saw a friend of his.
(3) Every admirer of a picture of himself is vain.
(4) Every man who owns a donkey beats him.

See Categorial Semantics and Scoping, F.C.N. Pereira, Computational Linguistics, 6:1, 1990.

The accessibility of certain NPs as arguments in various syntactic locations is determined by properties of the NP (whether it is a pronoun, reflexive, proper name, definite or indefinite reference) and of the syntactic context. Similar constraints also explain different scoping possibilities.

Binding and Control

Mary thinks that John likes her.
Mary likes herself.
John bought a picture of himself.
John thought that it would be illegal to undress himself.
They met each other
John talked to Paul about himself. / himself can refer both to Paul and John
John talked about himself to Paul / himself can refer only to John

;;              binding
;;             /      \
;;      referential expletive
;;         /   \         /   \
;;      npro   pro      it   there
;;            /   \
;;          ppro  anaphor
;;                /   \
;;         reflexive   reciprocal
;;

Last modified Apr 3rd, 2006