意味論研究会2018年4月6日

The scope anomaly observed in sentences like 'Mrs. J can’t live in Boston and Mr. J in LA’ (◇ > ∧) and No dog eats Whiskas or cat Alpo (¬∃ > ∨) is known to pose difficult challenges to many analyses of Gapping. We provide a resume of our analysis of Gapping in Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar, a variant of categorial grammar which builds on both the Lambek-inspired tradition and a more recent line of work modelling word order via a lambda calculus for the prosodic component. The flexible syntax-semantics interface of this framework enables us to characterize Gapping as an instance of like-category coordination, via a crucial use of the notion of hypothetical reasoning. This analysis of the basic syntax of Gapping is shown to interact with independently motivated analyses of scopal operators to immediately yield their apparently anomalous scopal properties in Gapping, offering, for the first time in the literature, a conceptually simple and empirically adequate solution for the notorious scope anomaly in Gapping. But our solution for this variety of non-constituent coordination has an unexpected benefit: it also provides an account of the same anomalous scope phenomenon evident in the Stripping ellipsis pattern, e.g. ‘John won’t sign the petition, or anyone else’, where by far the most prominent interpretion is a conjunction of negations (John won’t sign the petition, and no one else will sign the petition either). Current work by Daniel Puthuwala at Ohio State University shows that an independently motivated analysis of the Stripping ellipsis construction interacts with the account of anomalous scope in Gapping to give exactly the observed scoping of modals in Stripping, revealing an unexpected linkage between nonconstituent coordination and ellipsis in this domain.