Whence Long-Distance Indefinite Readings? Solving Chierchia's Puzzle with Dependent Types

摘要

Indefinites (e.g. a man, some woman) have given rise to a number of puzzles concerning their scopal and dynamic behavior. One such puzzle about long-distance indefinites seems to be unsettled in the literature [3]. In this paper we show how Chierchia's puzzle of long-distance indefinites can be handled in semantics with dependent types. The proposal builds on our formal system combining generalized quantifiers [1,17,22] with dependent types [19,20,24] in [9,11].