5.2.3 Underspecified Descriptions

The notion of underspecified description.

The first thing we need to do now is to render the notion of underspecified description more precise. To see how we can describe all readings of an ambiguous sentence, let's go back to our favourite example, ``Every man loves a woman.'' We've said that the two readings of the sentence are these:

Assessing the material...

Now the important observation is that both readings consist of the same material: the representations of the two quantified NPs and the nuclear scope. The difference is in the way that these three fragments are put together. Both quantifiers must have scope over , but they can still have scope over each other in either way.

...and describing its combinations.

If you have a closer look at what we've just said, you'll notice that this is a description of the two possible readings - in an informal way, of course. Underspecification formalisms are all about making such descriptions more formal: They specify what material the readings of a sentence consist of (in our example, the three formula fragments), and what structural constraints one must obey when arranging them into complete formulas. What is left underspecified is which of these readings is the "right" reading of a specific utterance of the sentence.