Linguistics Seminar Talk - Uli Sauerland

Binding explained away (joint work with I. Bassi, P. Jeretic, and M.C. Meyer)

The availability of bound interpretations in language has generally been explained binding-specific logical mechanisms such as lambda-abstraction, assignment sequences or combinatorial operators as part of the language faculty. We present an alternative account of the core cases of bound interpretations that assumes only indepently motivated semantic operations, in particular event minimization and predicate exhaustification.  Our proposal assumes that bound elements are always existentials, though they may be realized as definites, pronouns or gaps. Having motivated our mechanism for bound interpretations, we then explore structural conditions the account predicts.