More readings than I thought: quantifier interaction in analysing the temporal structure of repeated eventualities

Abstract

Focusing on the temporal structures of the events described by language, the sentence 'Simmer the soup stirring it occasional(y for fifteen minutes' without punctuation, has three syntactic structures, which give rise to five semantic interpretations. All five readings are valid, but they can only be found if we take the view, proposed by Moltmann[8], that temporal (and spatial) measure adverbials play the role of part quantifiers. Using this approach, and extending it to include the notion that it is appropriate to treat event quantifiers and object quantifiers in similar ways, we also are able to find the two interpretations of the sentence 'Mary visited a friend every week' which many computational systems do not distinguish. The two interpretations can be paraphrased as «There is a friend that Mary has, whom she visited every week» and «Every week, Mary participated in the activity of "visiting a friend",· the object of the activity need not be the same for each week 's activity» In this paper, I describe first of all the justification for adopting Moltmann's view, and then demonstrate how this can be used in a computational system to highlight ambiguity. I argue that treating measure adverbials as quantifiers exposes some appropriate ambiguity that would otherwise remain hidden. I have used this approach in the implementation of a computational system that identifies all the available meanings when temporal measure adverbials and quantifiers interact. The implementation makes use of a standard algorithm for quantifier scoping[4], that has been used for scoping quantified terms describing objects, and applies it to both objects and events.