Talk by Manfred Pinkal
Radical Underspecification
The talk deals with two kinds of semantic underspecification phenomena:
semantic underspecification induced by syntactic ambiguity, and
underspecification arising from incomplete lingistic input, which
is typical for spoken discourse. It presents a higher-order constraint
language as description formalism, using a restricted version of
higher-order unification (linear unification) for constraint solving. It is
demonstrated that the formalism allows modelling of underspecification
cases from these two areas as well as those kinds of semantic
underspecification that have been treated in the literature so far, in
particular, underspecified quantifier scope.
Paul Dekker, November 2, 1995