Covert movement in logical grammar

  • Authors:
  • Carl Pollard

  • Affiliations:
  • INRIA-Lorraine and Ohio State University

  • Venue:
  • Logic and grammar
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

We propose a formal reconstruction of the well-known storage-and-retrieval technique for scoping quantifiers and other 'covertly moved' semantic operators due to Cooper (1975). In the proposed reconstruction, grammar rules are presented in the familiar term-labelled Gentzensequent style of natural deduction.What is new is that, in addition to the usual contexts to the left of the turnstile (recording undischarged pairs of hypotheses, with each pair consisting of a syntactic variable ('trace') and a corresponding semantic variable), our typing judgments also include a co-context to the right of the co-turnstile (⊣). A co-context consists of a list of semantic variables, each paired with a quantifier that corresponds to the meaning expressed by a quantified noun phrase whose scope has not yet been specified. Besides the usual logical rules, the grammar also contains rules called Commitment and Responsibility that implement, respectively, storage and retrieval of semantic operators.