This paper focuses on the semantics of interrogative sentences and has three main parts

This paper presents a substantially revised version of the theory developed in my thesis, Ginzburg 1992a, and in Ginzburg 1992b. All acknowledgements from those works carry over to the present one. In particular, I would like to thank my adviser Stanley Peters for many useful suggestions and encouragement. I would particularly like to thank Robin Cooper: many of the ideas in this current paper arose as a result of joint work, reported in Cooper and Ginzburg 1993, and currently emerging as Cooper and Ginzburg (in progress). I would also like to thank Enric Vallduv'i for extensive comments on an earlier draft and much moral and schm/boozal support, David Milward for many useful suggestions, comments on a draft and occasional skepticism, Elisabet Engdahl for stimulating discussion, the members of the MaC group in Edinburgh and audiences at the 1993 LSA summer institute and the LSA/ASL conference on Logic and Linguistics both at Columbus, Ohio.

I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of underspecification is developed `from the first principles', i.e., starting from a definition of what it means for a sentence to be semantically ambiguous and from what we know about the way humans deal with ambiguity. An underspecified language is specified as the translation language of a grammar covering sentences that display three classes of semantic ambiguity: lexical ambiguity, scopal ambiguity, and referential ambiguity. The expressions of this language denote sets of senses. A formalization of defeasible reasoning with underspecified representations is presented, based on Default Logic. Some issues to be confronted by such a formalization are discussed. 1 The Combinatorial Explosion Puzzle The alternative syntactic readings of a sen...

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Making linguistic theory is like specifying a programming language...

Accounts of semantic phenomena often involve extending types of meanings and revising composition rules at the same time. The concept of monads allows many such accounts---for intensionality, variable binding, quantification and focus---to be stated uniformly and compositionally.

This paper is a revision of parts of my dissertation (von Fintel 1994). For helpful discussion and comments, I am particularly indebted to Angelika Kratzer, Barbara Partee, Irene Heim, Roger Schwarzschild, Arnim von Stechow, Susanne Tunstall, the members of the Spring 1994 semantics seminar at MIT, the audience at SALT 4 (University of Rochester, May 6, 1994), and the audiences at a colloquium and a workshop at the University of Rochester, February 3, 1995. I also thank Henritte de Swart for her critique of my dissertation (de Swart 1995)

In this paper I argue that the `ambiguity' between mention-all and mentionsome readings of questions can be resolved when we relate it to the decision problem of the questioner. By relating questions to decision problems, I (i) show how we can measure the utilities of both mention-all and mention-some readings of questions, and (ii) give a natural explanation under which circumstances the mention-some reading is preferred.

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We first show on a number of examples that positive polar questions, negative polar questions and alternative questions (containing a proposition and its negation) are not interchangeable in context. We will account for the differences pragmatically, using decision theory. We offer a simple classification of three types of use, which covers a number of phenomena hitherto not systematically dealt with. Finally, we do away with Ladd’s typology of negative polar questions and give a more systematic interpretation of the data.