The role of situations and presuppositions in restricting adverbial quantification.

摘要

This thesis proposes a novel solution to the problem of determining the domain of an adverbial quantifier. Adverbial quantification crucially differs from nominal quantification in that, in general, no indication of the domain of quantification is syntactically given in an adverbially quantified sentence. As a result, two questions about adverbial quantifier domains naturally arise. First, what kind of entities do these domains range over? Second, how are these domains restricted?; In our answer to the first question, we follow a tradition of research that takes adverbial quantifiers to quantify over situations. Unlike other situation-based accounts, however, we make use of the situation theory underlying Episodic Logic [Schubert and Hwang, 2000]. We argue that the characterization relation between situations and sentences that this situation theory provides is well-suited to the problem of picking out situations precisely for quantification. Furthermore, the ability to characterize situations with negated propositions plays an important role in our analysis of domain restriction. We develop a complete hybrid logic based on this situation theory, as well as a full dynamic semantic representation language based on Discourse Representation Theory.; An answer to the second question must address how both sentence-internal material and context restrict adverbial quantifier domains. Inspired by alternative-based accounts of focus and genericity, we take the domain of an adverbial quantifier to be restricted to situations characterized by the disjunction of the quantifier's scope and its scope's negation. Such a characterization is relatively straightforward to compute from the surface form, and, given our situation theory and a general theory of presupposition and its interaction with focus, provides a non-trivial description of the domain that correctly incorporates presuppositions triggered in the scope and accounts for focus-sensitivity of adverbial quantification. We further take this domain description itself to trigger a domain set presupposition that must be resolved in context, which accounts for the context-dependency of adverbial quantification.