Exceptional Scope as Discourse Reference to Quantificational Dependencies

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of exceptional scope (ES) of (in)definites, exemplified by the widest and intermediate scope readings of the sentence Every student of mine read every poem that a famous Romanian poet wrote. We propose that the ES readings have two sources: (i) discourse anaphora to particular sets of entities and quantificational dependencies between these entities that restrict the domain of quantification of the two universal determiners and the indefinite article; (ii) non-local accommodation of the discourse referent that restricts the quantificational domain of the indefinite article. Our account, formulated within a compositional dynamic system couched in classical type logic, relies on two independently motivated assumptions: (a) the discourse context stores not only (sets of) individuals, but also quantificational dependencies between them, and (b) quantifier domains are always contextually restricted. Under this analysis, (in)definites are unambiguous and there is no need for special choice-functional variables to derive exceptional scope readings. 1 The Problem and the Basic Proposal The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of exceptional scope (ES) of (in)definites (first noticed in [Farkas(1981)]), a problem that is still open despite the many insightful attempts in the literature to solve it. The ES cases we focus on here are the widest and the intermediate scope readings of (1), given below in first order translations: 1. Every student of mine read every poem that a famous Romanian poet wrote. 2. Narrowest scope (NS) indefinite: ∀x(stud.o.m(x)→ ∀y(poem(y) ∧ ∃z(r.poet(z) ∧ write(z, y))→ read(x, y))) 3. a. Intermediate scope (IS) indefinite: ∀x(stud.o.m(x)→ ∃z(r.poet(z)∧∀y(poem(y)∧write(z, y)→ read(x, y)))) b. Context for the IS reading: It has been established that every student chose a poet and read every poem written by him. ? We are grateful to Pranav Anand, Sam Cumming and the audience of the Rutgers Semantics Workshop (October 5-6, 2007) for comments and discussion. The usual