A Pragmatic Treatment of Quantification in Natural Language

Abstract

Quantification in natural language is an important phenomena that seems to touch on some pragmatic and inferential aspects of language understanding. In this paper we focus on quantifier scope ambiguity and suggest a cognitively plausible model that resolves a number of problems that have traditionally been addressed in isolation. Our claim here is that the problem of quantifier scope ambiguity can not be adequately addressed at the syntactic and semantic levels, but is an inferencing problem that must be addressed at the pragmatic and discourse levels 1 . Quantification in Natural Language Quantification is an important phenomena that seems to touch on a number of inferential and pragmatic aspects of language understanding. To illustrate the "pragmatic" aspect of this problem, consider the following examples involving the problem of quantifier scope ambiguity: (1) John advertised a restaurant on every street (2) John visited a restaurant on every street In compositiona...