Quantifiers, Deduction, and Context

The nineties have witnessed a dramatic expansion in work on the interface between semantics and pragmatics. The seven contributions to this volume provide perspectives on two central themes of this expansion: the variety of quantifiers and the role of context in interpretation.

Topics pertinent to the logical analysis of quantifiers include: a study of differences between English and French in the expression of genericity; an analysis of exception sentences with monadic and polyadic quantifiers; and the use of linear logic to mediate between the f-structure of LFG and their semantic interpretations, accounting for the interactions between quantifier scope ambiguity and bound anaphora. Among the papers on the role of context in interpretation are: an analysis of the context-dependency of relational predicates. with implicit arguments such as win and local; a solution to the Sorites Paradox arguing that the context-dependency of the revelant vague predicate makes the crucial premise in the soites argument ambiguous; the use of dynamic modal logic to model dynamic updating of contexts and to analyze presupposition failures; and an investigation of how discourse context controls the space of interacting prefernces in determining the referents of pronouns.

This book addresses a wide range of issues in the interdisciplinary field of logics, language, and computation, and will be of significant interest to semanticists, logicians, philosophers of language, and computational linguists.

Makoto Kanazawa is associate professor of cognitive sciences at Chiba University, Chiba, Japan. Christopher Piñón is an NSF-NATO postdoctoral fellow at Arbeitgruppe Strukturelle Grammatik (Max-Planck-Gesellschaft), Berlin. Henriëtte de Swart is assistant professor of linguistics at Stanford University.

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