more semantics

[Daniel L. Everett]

I would suggest reading May's more recent works or Hornstein's new book on
Logical Form, before arriving at conclusions on what LF does or doesn't do
or what means it has at its disposal for accomplishing its purposes. 

On Mon, 20 May 1996, Alex Alsina wrote:

> Gert Webelhuth says:
> 
> > It is not necessary for GB to make the strong claim that every
> > sentence that is n times ambiguous have n distinct syntactic
> > representations. Bob May, for instance, in his book on LF (was it
> > May (1985) ?) allows for one LF to have more than one distinct
> > semantic interpretations.
> 
> If this is true (and by "n distinct syntactic representations" Gert
> means "n distinct LF representations, which are semantic in substance
> but syntactic in appearance"), there is something I'm missing.  I take
> the following assumptions to be valid:
> 
> 	1. Ambiguity (as opposed to vagueness) is a linguistic
> phenomenon and therefore should be captured by the grammar and
> represented in some linguistic level of representation.

Well, at least some kinds of ambiguity are linguistic. So let's concede
this.

> 
> 	2. LF in GB is the level of representation that deals with
> linguistic meaning and therefore any distinction involving linguistic
> meaning must be represented at LF.
> 
> >From these assumptions it follows that, in GB, ambiguity, which has to
> do with meaning, must be captured at LF; in other words, in GB, an
> ambiguous string of words must have alternative grammatical
> representations, distinct at least at LF, one for each of the
> alternative meanings.  If this is not correct, it must be because one
> of the two assumptions in 1 and 2 is not valid, but I wouldn't know
> which one or in what way it doesn't hold.  I took a look at May's book
> but I didn't see any reference to the idea that a single LF
> representation could have more than one semantic representation, but
> maybe I didn't look in the right places.
> 

What I think Gert had in mind was May's notion of Absorption. That is in
his newer book. Absorption captures the notion that quantifiers in 
certain configurational relationships are freely ordered (at LF) with 
respect to one another. That makes the meaning relationship explicit, in 
the grammar, so neither 1 nor 2 needs to be abandoned.

-- Dan Everett