Coreference in Non-constituent coordination

[Dick Hudson]

At the risk of outstaying my welcome, how about these?
(a)	After the examiners' meeting we'll know who passed and failed.
(b)	Who got the two departmental prizes? The students who came first in
syntax and wrote the longest essay for semantics.
(c)	It was an Englishman who first climbed Everest and ran the first
four-minute mile. (or: ... Englishmen)
(d)	Most of the work was done by the girls, but a boy stood at the door and
served behind the bar. (meaning the people who stood at the door or served
behind the bar were boys).

Dick

At 19:10 17/05/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>
>Regarding (1)-(3), Chris Manning wrote:
>
>>> (1) People come to London in the summer and avoid it in the winter.
>>> (2) Only one student got a distinction and failed - all the rest just
passed.
>>> (3) One boy kissed Mary and hugged Jane - all the other girls got kisses
>>>     and hugs from several boys.
>
>> I would agree that it seems hard out of context to get the desired
>> reading of (2).  But, at any rate, there's an extensive literature
>> arguing this back and forth.  I think most people accept that this
>> reading is felicitous for some sentences with this structure.  See for
>> instance Section 7.6 of Carpenter's Type Logical Semantics.
>
>I have to point out that Carpenter's discussion in this section offers
>one new example (due to Dale Gerdemann):
>
>(42a) He's gonna find out who's naughty and nice.
>
>Otherwise, the discussion in this section simply refers to that of Hermann
>Hendriks' (1993), who claimed that such examples are ambiguous, a claim that
>has been challenged by many native speakers, most famously perhaps, by
>Partee's earlier observation that exx. like (4) are unambigous:
>
>(4) Few books are explicit and easy to read.
>
>I have to agree with Ash and Paul in rejecting the distributed quantifier
>readings for (1)-(3). Though (42a) does occur in a Christmas carol (Santa
>Claus is Coming to Town), it could well be poetic license of some kind,
>motivated by the meter, for example (`...who's naughty and who's nice' really
>changes the rhythmic feel of the song). Have people found other naturally
>occurring examples of distributed quantifiers in subject position?
>
>-Ivan
>
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Ivan A. Sag
>Professor of Linguistics
>Director of Graduate Studies: Symbolic Systems Program
>Senior Researcher: Center for the Study of Language and Information
>Stanford University - Stanford, CA  94305  USA
>-------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>

Richard (= Dick) Hudson

Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London,
Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT.
+44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108;
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm