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Domain and scope of existentials in spoken and sign language| old_uid | 13447 |
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| title | Domain and scope of existentials in spoken and sign language |
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| start_date | 2014/02/14 |
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| schedule | 11h30-13h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | I. They can "take scope" over other quantifiers, yielding ambiguity in sentences like (1) (one dog total, or one per cat?).
II. They easily and promiscuously undergo domain restriction: the sentence in (2) is not a statement about every single bottle in the universe, but merely about the bottles in some relevant context.
(1) Some dog chased every cat.
(2) Every bottle is empty.
These two facts interact in logically interesting ways when it comes to existential quantifiers ("some boy", "a dog", "one pencil"): in particular, if the domain of the existential is restricted to a singleton individual, the existential becomes effectively scopeless (the two meanings in (1) become synonymous if there is only one dog to choose from). Based on this observation, Schwarzschild (2002) proposes that it is exactly this interaction which is responsible for a group of surprisingly wide-scope readings that are sometimes available for existential quantifiers.
In this talk, I revisit this connection with data from sign language, in which the use of space allows quantificational domains to be overtly realized (Davidson and Gagne 2013), and in which the scopal properties of existentials depend on this use of space (Barbarà 2012). I overview these facts, then sketch a semantic analysis in terms of domain restriction/choice functions. Notable connections, both theoretical and empirical, are also drawn to the theory of dynamic semantics, a model that is used for the introduction and retrieval of discourse referents. |
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| responsibles | Dezecache |
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