Decompositionality and identity

The Scope of quantificational phrases (QPs) is often not represented in surface structures, in the sense that a constituent that is, on the surface, sister to a QP is not necessarily interpreted as its argument semantically. QPs can take wider or narrower scope than their surface position (Scope Widening and Scope Narrowing). Based on the fact that when an elided constituent contains a variable that takes part in a particular type of binding dependency, the biggest deletable constituent must be elided, Chapter 2 argues that the presence of this maximization effect in the context of Scope Widening is straightforwardly explained by syntactic approaches, in which QPs undergo movement to widen their scope, rather than by semantic approaches, which adopt type shifting rules to deal with Scope Widening. Chapter 3 defends the copy theory of movement, which captures the effects of Scope Narrowing in a simple way, by developing a new theory of the counter-cyclic merger, which accounts for the facts that seem challenging to this theory. Those facts have been taken to indicate that movement sometimes leaves a trace. I propose that restrictors of determiners can merge with them counter-cyclically. Copies of determiners without their restrictors turn into syntactic objects that receive the same interpretation as that assigned to a trace.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Takahashi, Shoichi, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Danny Fox.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34201

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34201