The role of presuppositions and situations in the interpretation of adverbial quantifiers

This paper describes a method for computing the domain of quantification of an adverbially quantified sentence. This method relies on the accommodation of presuppositions in the scope of a quantificational adverb and on the resolution of the domain in context. Situations form the link between adverbial quantifiers and presuppositions, as adverbial quantifiers are taken to quantify over situations and presuppositions are taken to be constraints on resource situations. This paper also briefly describes a computational system for processing such sentences based on this method. This work was supported by NSF grant IIS-0082928.