5.2.2 Computational Advantages

Underspecification overcomes the problems arising out of the combinatorial explosion.

Outlook

From a computational perspective the central hope connected with underspecification is that we will be able to overcome the problems arising out of the combinatorial explosion. We don't have the time here to go into it, but people have shown how to lift -reduction and even some first-order deduction (we're going to hear about first-order deduction in Chapter 10) to underspecified descriptions. More than anything, however, underspecification may be an ideal platform when it comes to incorporating external information that excludes irrelevant readings. We have seen above that the theoretically possible number of readings of a sentence may be much higher than the number of readings that are actually possible in a given context. People have preferences for certain readings (e.g. going back to the word order), or they may judge some readings implausible. Underspecification may make it possible to exclude impossible or dispreferred readings without ever seeing them. But this is ongoing research and beyond the scope of this introduction.