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The Meaning of Multiple Quantified Sentences

Summary/Abstract: In my paper I focus on the linguistic phenomenon of multiple quantification. My aim is to defend the grammatical ambiguity hypothesis, the view that a multiple quantified sentence of a language L is semantically ambiguous if a grammar for L (understood as the cognitive mechanism that maps sentences onto meanings) encodes a class of interpretations — specifies the space of possible interpretations of that sentence. I argue both against the position of a unitary semantics: ambiguous sentences encode a single sense, a pragmatic (context dependent) derivation is essential in arriving at the other interpretations; and against that of radical pragmatics: ambiguous sentences encode no senses at all, a pragmatic derivation is essential in arriving at any interpretation (at all). In my attempt at providing a plausible account of semantic ambiguity, I use a combination of approaches and methods: theories of grammar (such as Government and Binding Theory), tools of mathematical logic, linguistic studies and the results of psycholinguistic experiments.

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