JOURNAL OF SE MANTICS
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JOURNAL. OF SEMANTICS Volume rs Number
I
CONTE NTS REINHARD BLUTNER AND
Editorial Preface
RoB
VAN DER SANDT
1
KEEs vAN DEEMTER
Ambiguity and Idiosyncratic Interpretation EGG Wh-questions in Underspecified Minimal Recursion Semantics
MARCUS
NICHOLAS AsHER AND ALEX LASCARIDES
Bridging
s
37 83
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Scope of this Journal The JOURNAL OF SEMANTICS publishes articles, notes, discussions, and book reviews in the area of natural language semantics. It is explicitly interdisciplinary, in that it aims at an integration of philosophical, psychological, and linguistic semantics as well as semantic work done in artificial intelligence and anthropology. Contributions must be of good quality {to be judged by at least two referees) and should relate to questions of comprehension and interpretation of sentences or texts in natural language. The editors welcome not only papers that cross traditional discipline boundaries, but also more specialized contributions, provided they are accessible to and interesting for a wider readership. Empirical relevance and formal correcmess are paramount among the criteria of acceptance for publicatioiL
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journal of&manlics
15: 1-3
© Oxford Universiry Press 1998
Editorial Preface
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Underdetermination of meaning has recently become a central issue in computational semantics and formal language processing. Developments in these fields have made clear that spelling out all the information which can be given at some level of representation goes beyond what is needed to arrive at a full interpretation of an utterance. The proliferation of formal structures (and their corresponding interpretations) in actual attempts to·do so is moreover unwanted for reasons of computational complexity and at odds with the fact that natural language users tend to process ambiguous expressions without any effort. Over the last few years several efforts have been made to overcome these limitations by developing semantic theories of underspecification. Such theories are based on representations that are themselves ambiguous. Much of this research has been motivated by computational considerations, the favorite applications having to do with (quantifier) scbpe and ellipsis. This has led to various representational formats all of which underdetermine the actual interpretation of utterances. From a methodological perspective work on underspecification forces us to rethink the traditional way in which the semantics/pragmatics boundary has been drawn. In recent years (and under the influence of the 'dynamic turn') there has been a shift in emphasis from pragmatics to semantics. Many phenomena which had been labeled pragmatic in earlier theories turned out to be amenable to a semantic treatment in dynamic theories ('intonational' focus, 'pragmatic' presupposition, connotations of temporal succession, etc.). Recent work in underspecification seems to push us in the opposite direction. Once we allow 'flat' underspecified representations we shift much of the burden of determining the information that a sentence conveys back to pragmatics again. The point is more than just a matter of terminology and brings us to questions of lexical representation, abduction, defeasible reasoning and the role of contextual accommodation in linguistic processing. Most of the papers in this issue derive from a workshop on 'Structural Grammar' which was organized by the Max-Planck ·Research Group in Berlin. The aim of the workshop was to consider underspecification from the perspective of theoretical linguistics. Recognizing the important role of the lexicon in current theorizing, the workshop devoted special attention to the lexical aspects of semantic underspecification and the inclusion of underspecified lexical entities in the general setup of grammar. A second
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Editorial Preface
Downloaded from jos.oxfordjournals.org by guest on January 1, 2011
central topic of the workshop related to the mechanisms which allow us to derive conceptually/contextually enriched interpretations from semantically underdetermined representati