Quantifiers, Contexts, and Anaphora

Abstract

In this article we study the interpretation of nominal anaphora by means of generalized quantifier theory. One way of viewing first-order DRT and DPL is that they interpret singular anaphora outside the scope of their antecedent by extending the antecedent's scope. Moving to the general case, we therefore want to know how general these scope principles are. We shall argue that they can be sustained for all singular anaphora, but that they may fail for plural anaphoric noun phrases. Some recent dynamic semantics of quantifiers are reviewed in this light. Our own proposal stands in the E-type tradition. It treats the relevant anaphora as generalized quantifiers which are contextually restricted by material inherited from their antecedent. Indeed, all E-type anaphora are interpreted by one and the same mechanism. To make this precise, we present a labelled, many dimensional categorical system, which generates the meaning of a wide class of discourses in a compositional way.