Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Thursday, November 08, 16:15, Building 17, Seminar Room

Relative Clauses with Quantifiers and Definiteness

(joint work with Caroline Heycock)

The problem addressed in this talk relates to the fact that functional readings are licensed in (predicative) relative clauses only when the head of the relative is definite. Indefinite heads necessarily take wide scope over subsequent quantifiers. (The crucial data are pairs like `the woman every man invited' vs. `a woman every man invited'). The observation is due to Bianchi (1999) who takes such facts as evidence for Kayne's (1994) Raising analysis of relative clauses and in particular the hypothesis that the determiner of the relative head is base-generated externally. It is this fact, the existence of an external determiner or not, that, according to Bianchi, explains the availability of a wide scope reading for the universal in relative clauses.

I will review Bianchi's solution and discuss a number of problems it faces. I will then turn to recent work by Sharvit (1997), who has extended the functional analysis of questions (and relatives in equative sentences) to predicative relatives. In particular, I will review her proposal that relatives in predicative clauses involve pair-list functions rather than natural ones and provide evidence indicating that the functions involved in (predicative) relatives are natural ones. This part of the argument will be crucial in as much as natural functions will be argued to be `functions-in-intension' and distinguished from pair-list ones, which are viewed as `functions-in-extension'. Sharvit's work does not provide any explicit link between `intensional' functions and definiteness. Such a link, however, is offered by Lobner's (1985) work who explicitly associates the definite article with a functional interpretation of a DP. I will adopt parts of his proposal in order to explain the definiteness effects in predicative relative clauses and also their apparent absence in equative sentences.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Frank Keller.