Categorematic unreducible polyadic quantifiers in Lexical Resource Semantics

Abstract

Early work on quantification in natural languages showed that sentences like `Every ape picked different berries', on the reading that the sets of berries picked by any two apes are not the same, can be logically represented with a single polyadic quantifier for the two nominal phrases. However, since that quantifier cannot be decomposed into two quantifiers for the two nominal phrases, a compositional semantic analysis of this reading is not possible under standard assumptions about syntax and semantics. This paper shows how a constraint-based semantics with Lexical Resource Semantics can define a systematic syntax-semantics interface which captures the reading in question with a polyadic quantifier.