Dynamics, Polarity, and Quantification

The study of natural language semantics has grown increasingly sophisticated in recent years, both in the subtlety of empirical phenomena accounted for and in the range of logical techniques applied. This collection offers a unique window into the field of current formal semantics, illustrating four areas of research concentration, including negative polarity, plurals, generalized quantifiers, and dynamic semantics.

The papers on negative polarity demonstrate that a semantic approach based on monotonicity properties is flexible enough to shed light on the full typology of polarity items. The papers on plurals characterize the various interpretations of plural NPs in sentences, using purely set theoretic entities and analyzing verb phrases as collections of sets of individuals. The contributions devoted specifically to quantification provide new logical results on the reducibility of n-ary and polyadic quantifiers. The papers on dynamic semantics propose extensions of Groenendijk and Stokhof's Dynamic Predicate Logic to the analysis of generalized quantifiers and epistemic Modality.

Addressing issues of major concern in logical semantics, this book will be of crucial interest to semanticists, logicians, and philosophers of language.

Mokoto Kanazawa is associate professor of cognitive and information sciences at Chiba University, Chiba, Japan. Christopher J. Piñón is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford.

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