Types of relations

Abstract

Many arguments for flexible type assignment to syntactic categories have to do with the need to account for the various scopings resulting from the interaction of quantified DPs with other quantified DPs or with intensional or negated verb contexts. We will define a type for arbitrary arity relations in polymorphic type theory. In terms of this, we develop the Boolean algebra of relations as far as needed for natural language semantics. The type for relations is flexible: it can do duty for the whole family of types t, e → t, e → e → t, and so on. If we use this flexible type for the interpretations of verbs, we can perform a ‘flexible lift’ on DP interpretations, so that DPs get interpreted as operations on verb meanings. This leads to an elegant implementation of Keenan’s proposal for polyadic quantification in natural language (‘Beyond the Frege Boundary’). It turns out that scope reorderings are particularly easy to implement in this framework.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

  • This entry has no external links. Add one.
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

  • Only published works are available at libraries.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
34 (#407,456)

6 months
1 (#1,042,085)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Jan Van Eijck
University of Amsterdam

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references