OsloScopalNonScopal

Discussion: Scopal and Non-Scopal Modifiers

Moderator: GuyEmerson Scribe: EmilyBender

Kim didn't speak for a long time.
Kim deliberately didn't speak.

Dan: didn't speak for a long time ex is quite a nice case study. Does it make sense to say yes it's ambiguous and the for along time takes as label the neg_rel but takes as ARG1 the ARG0 of event of speaking. If we want the ARG0 of the neg_rel, that forces it out into the open, which we haven't wanted.

Guy: Ann says it seems strange to talk about a negated event, to have negation itself is a SOA.

Dan: not speaking is fun --- what is the thing that's fun? What's the argument of fun. Not just speaking, it's the non-speaking that's fun.

Emily: But if not speaking is a nominalization, then we have an 'x'.

Guy: But that variable is just as dodgy as the negated variable. We have to justify one of these variables.

Dan: If you move out of the MRS into the real universe, what are you saying isn't fun?

Guy: In the model of the world.

Dan: There needs to be some state of affairs we're talking about.

Guy: What is a state of affairs that is a nominalization.

Dan: Maybe this takes us too far afield.

Guy: But maybe it's an argument if we have to be able to refer to it.

Emily: Can it be the antecedent of anaphora? Someone else think of it while I'm typing.

Dan: John didn't speak. It really surprised us because John always speaks.

Emily: But we know that it can refer back to propositions.

Dan: *John didn't speak and Kim did so.

Woodley: *John probably spoke and so did Mary.

Oe: John frequenty visits and so does Mary. --- Is frequently scopal?

Dan: It satisfies the entailment test.

Berthold: A presupposition attached to so... do we represent negation as events.

Dan: If it's really there, then you ought to be able to pick it out with an anaphor like so.

Woodley: Can you pick out the event for blue in A blue dog just walked by with an anaphor? Maybe it's too stringent of a test.

Dan/Glenn: John didn't speak, neither did Mary.

Emily: So what's going on there? ... refers back to event inside the negation.

Berthold: Making neg transparent to INDEX of complement --- neg LBL shared with intersective modifier (in high attachment), with ARG1 = ARG0 of verb.

Emily: That's what happens now, if we allow high attachment.

Woodley: But that doesn't work so well for Kim deliberately didn't speak. Are we really happy with ARG0 of speak as ARG1 of deliberately?

Emily: What I'm missing is a connection between our representations and the actual interpretations/things we can test like entailment.

Guy: Depends on what you want to do with negation in the object language. If it's just logical negation, it has to apply to propositions, and that doesn't help here.

Dan: Kim deliberately failed to speak --- not just a fiddling with scope. failed introduces a new predication with speak down inside. There fail supplies us with what we all assume is a predication. Somehow the action that was constrained was the speaking one, but the deliberateness is about the failing.

Guy/Dan: If we can talk about failing events, maybe we can talk about negation events?

Francis: Kim failed to speak and so did Mary. --- that one's fine.

Glenn: The do support?

Woodley: Something just weird about English.

Emily: Which do support?

Glenn: The one in the first clause.

Emily: But that one's semantically empty.

Woodley: Maybe it's not?

Dan: *Kim wasn't happy and Mary was too. It's not about the do support.

Dan: Kim failed to be happy and so did Mary.

oe: Kim never danced. So did Mary. Star?

Dan/Francis: Star.

Guy: Failing seems to imply more active involvement.

oe: Kim almost fell. So did Mary. Also a scopal modifier.

oe: Kim probably will turn out famous. And so will Mary. Maybe we're putting too much work on the so anaphor.

Dan: Then give us another test.

Woodley: Kim deliberately didn't speak. / Kim managed not to speak.

John: Deliberately not a great choice of word because with the post-posed variant, there's also the deliberately as slowly version.

Emily: [Tries to explain the current ERS.]

Woodley: Can you give me a world scenario where one is true and not the other.

Guy: In terms of intention to speak and whether or not speaking happened.

oe: Emily just misused the entailment test. It only goes one direction --- entailment doesn't show anything. So we don't know that deliberately is non-scopal.

Emily: Can we construct a slightly more complicated example that gives us different scope possibilities.

Guy: Scope possibilities is a separate question from denotation.

Woodley: I'd like to be able to find differences that aren't just lexical semantics but have to do with the structure.

Emily: My point was that the denotations might be world-equivalent, but allow different flexibilities in more complicated examples.

oe: Kim successfully didn't speak. Kim succeeded in not speaking.

Dan: But there's a nominalization there.

oe: Play the same trick with a verb that actually selects a VP and has a closely-related looking adverb.

Dan/Guy: Back to big questions:

• Is the denotational distinction clear in practice?
• Is the scoping machinery adequate?

Woodley: Do we have a collective sense of whether or not deliberately is scopal?

Emily: And how would we know?

oe: Clear scope ambiguities might help...

Guy: That would assume that the scoping machinery is correct in all cases.

oe: You're pulling many rugs out from under us.

Jan-Tore: If heavily is intersective, shouldn't it's raining heavily also entail it's heavily. What about subsective modifiers?

Emily/Dan: We're trying to move to scopal/non-scopal, but we have intersective as a label in the grammar (incorrectly).

Guy: In terms of what the MRS gives us, it's saying that once you've expanded the scope tree there's some event that is raining, and some event heavy that takes it as its argument. Once you've quantified the event variables, then you have a complex predicate which you could be intersecting with the rain predicate. We're intersecting the things that are raining events and the set of things that have an associated heavy event.

Glenn: Would it be better to say the set of things that are heavy?

Guy: That's not what we have in the MRS. We have two events --- raining and heavy. We have the second variable in case we need to modify it again. This is not a move that every semanticist makes.

Emily: What about Kim probably baked a cake for Sandy. / Kim baked a cake probably for Sandy. --- seems like a surprising generalization of degree specifiers for me. These examples came up because I was looking for cases where the label of bake and for might need to be different.

Dan: So what do you want the representation to be?

Guy/Woodley: probably as a scopal modifier of for, probably shares label with bake, qeq for label as ARG1; for takes ARG0 of bake.

Dan: And Kim baked a cake not for Sandy?

oe/Woodley: Same.

Berthold: The most probable answer to our problem is X./The answer to our problem is most probably X. Different in the ERG.

Dan: The ERG implements the hypothesis that there are no scopal adjectives.

Guy: Is that right?

Dan: Show me some tests. Alex Lascarides says there aren't any. Treat them as the same. If that's wrong, then show me the tests.

Jan Tore: Entailment.

Guy: Is a probable solution a solution?

Jan Tore: Certain non-intersective adjectives will fail, but they're not scopal either. Earlier we said that that test is just one way, but adjectives are a counterexample.

Emily: I have in the past convinced myself that there are enough readings of The most probable winner of every medal was disqualified that we need the every to be able to go in between probable and winner. But this is the kind of test you told me I couldn't use.

Woodley: Question is if stone lion commits you to its being a lion.

Dan: Did you see the stone lion in front of the bank? That's not a lion, that's a tiger

Francis: Ham sandwich.

Dan: It's not a ham sandwich it's a lion.

Francis: Coercion from lion and representation of a lion.

Dan: You want it to be ambiguous?

Guy: Diff between metonymy and literal meaning.

Francis: A stone lion is not literally a lion.

Woodley: former is better. Saying a former X isn't committing to it being an X.

Glenn: Correcting intensional contexts is kind of out of scope here.

Guy: So the answer to the first question is no --- the denotational distinction is not clear cut. Not a very clear test.

oe: Are there really people who think stone lions aren't lions?

Francis: Me! A representation of a lion is not a lion.

Dan: What about a stuffed lion?

Francis: Depends on whether it originally was a lion.

Emily: Then it's a former lion!

Emily: But even if we find clarity in the literature on this, we still have the problem that the test goes in only one direction.

oe: Monday's solution to the problem turned out to be wrong. It wasn't a solution actually, but it was one on Monday. By that same reasoning, a former politician is in the set of politications, but the set membership has spatio-temporal extent?

Woodley: So does the event of not speaking have the predicate speak be true of it?

Guy: How could that be true of a non-speaking event? If we say someone didn't speak, we're not committing to them speaking at some other point. (Unlike with former).

Woodley: Exactly. In order for these to be parallel, you have that strange situation ... unless you're talking about strict logical negation, you're going to have speak(e) when you're talking about not speaking.

Guy: We're not committing to there being a speaking event.

Emily: Speaker commitments not every bit of the MRS, but calculated over the whole thing.

Guy: Not doing quantifiers for event variables yet, because don't yet know how. But if we treat them the same as every other variable, we'll need to quantify them somehow. So just because there's an event variable in the MRS, doesn't mean we're committing to it.

Woodley: Right. Kim didn't speak for a long time with high attachment of for a long time taking speak's ARG0 as its ARG1 but sharing LBL with neg, then the quantifier for speak's ARG0 has to be outside neg as well.

Guy: Create new predicate not-speak that maps from events to truth values.

Woodley: If not-speak is an opaque predicate...

Guy: It's compositional. We have to have some way of mapping from one kind of truth conditional function to a new one. Could be as simple as flip the truth value. When ever speaking is true, not speaking is false, and vice versa. Does require committing to being able to talk about not speaking events, and in this case it's also a for-a-long-time event.

oe: In this case, there's something in conventional logic that looks very tempting. But what about almost in almost succeeded --- much easier to start talking about states of affairs that are the almost ones.

Emily: So you're saying that we're being misled by the similarity between logical negation and natural language negation.

oe: Yes.

Emily: That brings up another question that I have: Why do we have a difference between heads that take scopal arguments and promote their own ARG0 as index and those that attach as modifiers which are transparent.

Guy: Transparent?

oe: Are shy about their intrinsic variables.

Guy: That's about composition, which I was trying to avoid here.

Emily: But also about representations, because some of the possibilities we are considering here are only made possible because of that transparency.

Francis: Back to stone lion. Nick Asher shows interesting facts from distributional semantics.

Berthold: But compounds might not be syntax...

Guy: Not clear-cut.

Woodley: So what's the alternative?

Guy: Yeahs, seems like a shame to get rid of info that we have.

Glenn: If there's a vilage of stone lions and there's one who sells stone, he'd be the stone lion ... and he actually is a lion.

Guy: On the second question --- we agree that we want two readings for Kim didn't speak for a long time but not yet sure whether we want to have negation events, or whether natural language negation should be the same as logical negation. Maybe almost gives better examples.

Woodley: Kim almost spoke for a long time / *How long did she almost?

Dan: Are we getting to a point where we see a very deep divide between Kim never spoke and Kim rarely spoke. The second one entails that Kim spoke at least once. But they seem like they're very close. Do we suddenly flip to a different type of modifier. Is rarely a different kind of modifier from not.

oe: These could all be scopal.

Dan: But what about frequently --- where in the cline are you going to make that cut.

Glenn: I don't think we can avoid treating zero as a categorically different thing.

oe: rarely and frequently come out on the other side of the entailment test than not and never, but they could all still be scopal.

Guy: Here's the slippery slope. Make everything scopal?

Dan: almost never means about the same thing as rarely.

Francis: It's a slippery slope. We know it. We don't know how and where to draw the line, but would like some reason to draw it.

oe: Or not draw it at all. Guy is dangling that possibility in front of us.

Emily: So trying that out and seeing where we get tangled up might lead us to a test that goes the other direction.

Guy: Comes back to Kim didn't speak for a long time

oe: Doesn't Emily's thought experiment fix that for us? Two readings.

Dan: What about Kim didn't speak loudly.

oe: Two readings.

Dan: What's the other one?

Francis: [Doesn't speak, loudly]

Emily: The silence was deafening.

Dan: I'm sure that's what that sentence means.

oe: But we're in the habit of giving more scoped readings than are easily teased out in the world.

Emily: Just a few...