5.1.3 A More Complex Example

An example where Montague's treatment fails.

So by sticking to the principles of classical Montague grammar, our implementation can only construct one reading per sentence. You may think: But hey, at least we get half of what we want. If this is what you think, the following example should convince you that things are really worse:

``Every owner of a siamese cat loves a therapist.''

Exercise 5.4

The sentence is syntactically unambiguous, that is there's only one syntax tree for it. Draw this syntax tree.

We have a scope ambiguity between three quantifiers in the example sentence. Below are four possible readings that are pretty easy to get for most speakers of English, and a fifth one which we will examine a little closer soon:

We have also given an equivalent expression for each of the readings that uses abbreviations for the determiners, and additionally abbreviates some of the less complex -expressions (if you like to, see for yourself by expanding and -reducing). This should give you an intuition of how the differences in meaning between the readings actually go back to different ways of ordering the determiners.

So far only the first reading can be produced by our implementation. Again the order of the quantifiers in this reading quite directly reflects the relations between the corresponding NPs in the syntax tree. For instance ``a therapist'' is a constituent of the VP ``loves a therapist''. Thus its quantifier is in the scope of the universal quantifier of the subject NP. The same goes for the existential quantifier of ``a siamese cat'', because the phrase is a constituent of the subject NP.

Exercise 5.5

Give natural language paraphrases for the first four readings (try to make them as unambiguous as possible).


Aljoscha Burchardt, Stephan Walter, Alexander Koller, Michael Kohlhase, Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos
Version 1.2.5 (20030212)