This course explores what the job of the contextual variable C should be in the theory of grammar. This variable can be seen to play a pretty important role in (1) (cf. Westerståhl (1984), and also von Fintel (1995), Musan (1995), among others):
(1) EveryC student arrived late
In (1), every quantifies over relevant students, not just students. Thus, (1) says that every relevant student arrived late; crucially, it does not say that every student (possibly, in the world) arrived late. If it did that, it would be very hard for (1) to ever be true. C is the locus of "relevant".
The following question arises: how is the value of C arrived at? The course will explore two approaches to this question. In one approach (see Eckardt (1993) and Geilfu( (1993)), a semantic mechanism is proposed such that the value for C in a given sentence is fixed once and for all. The other approach (see Büring (1995, 1997)) suggests that the value of C should be allowed to vary from context to context. We will see that only the second approach is capable of making the right predictions; this can be shown to be the case in sentences where intonation interacts with quantifier domain restrictions in interesting ways. Fun twists are added when a further ingredient, adverbial modification, is added to the picture.
Readings
Büring, Daniel (1995) The 59th Street Bridge Accent, PhD. Diss., Universität Tübingen
Büring, Daniel (1997) The Meaning of Topic and Focus, Routledge, London and New York
Eckardt, Regine (1993) "Adverbialsemantik und Fokusse, und wieso sie nicht zu trennen sind", ms., Stuttgart University
von Fintel, Kai (1995) Restrictions on Quantifier Domains, PhD Diss., UMass
Geilfuss, Jochen (1993) "Nominal Quantifiers and Association with Focus", in Peter Ackema and Maaike Schoorlemmer (eds.) Proceedings of the Workshop on the Syntactic and Semantic Analysis of Focus, Utrecht: OTS.
Musan, Renate (1995) On the Temporal Interpretation of Noun Phrases, PhD. Diss., MIT
Westerståhl, Dag (1985) "Logical Constants in Quantifier Languages", Linguistics and Philosophy, 8, 387-413