Exceptional Wide Scope as Anaphora to Quantificational Dependencies

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of exceptional scope (ES) of (in)definites, e.g. the widest and intermediate scope readings of the sentence Every student of mine read every poem that a famous Romanian poet wrote before World War II. We propose that ES readings are available when the sentence is interpreted as anaphoric to quantificational domains and quantificational dependencies introduced in the previous discourse. For example, the two every quantifiers and the indefinite in the example above may elaborate on the sets of individuals and the correlations between them introduced by a previous sentence like Every student chose a poet and read every poem written by him (for the intermediate scope reading) or a sentence like Every student chose a poet the same poet and read every poem written by him (for the widest scope reading). 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 we do not resort to movement or special storage mechanisms, nor do we posit special choice-functional variables. 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 [4]), 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 before World War II. 2. Narrowest scope (NS) indefinite: ∀x(student.o.m(x) → ∀y(poem(y) ∧ ∃z(r.poet(z) ∧ write(z, y)) → read(x, y))) 3. a. Intermediate scope (IS) indefinite: ∀x(student.o.m(x) → ∃z(r.poet(z) ∧ ∀y(poem(y) ∧ write(z, y) → read(x, y)))) b. Context for the IS reading: Every student chose a poet and read every poem written by him. 4. a. Widest scope (WS) indefinite: ∃z(r.poet(z) ∧ ∀x(student.o.m(x) → ∀y(poem(y) ∧ write(z, y) → read(x, y)))) b. Context for the WS reading: Every student chose a poet – the same poet – and read every poem written by him. We start from the observation that the availability of the ES readings is crucially dependent on the discourse context relative to which sentence (1) is interpreted. In particular, the IS reading is available when (1) is interpreted in the context provided by (3b), which, in fact, forces an IS interpretation. Similarly, the WS reading is the only available one in the discourse context provided by (4b). Consequently, we propose that ES readings are available when sentence (1) is interpreted as anaphoric to quantificational domains and quantificational dependencies introduced in the previous discourse, i.e. when the two every determiners and the indefinite article in (1) further elaborate on the sets of individuals and the correlations between them introduced in (3b) and (4b) – as shown in (5), (6) and (7) below (the superscripts and subscripts indicate the antecedent-anaphor relations). The IS interpretation arises because of the presence in the input discourse context of a function pairing u-students and u-Romanian poets that rules out the possibility of