Formal Semantic Analysis Of Quantifier Scope Ambiguity In English

Previous studies on the quantifier scope ambiguities mainly fall into the domain of formal semantics and other updated formal semantic theories, i.e., the quantifier raising in the framework of Generative Semantics, quantifying-in in traditional Montague Grammar, and quantifier storage in elegantly generalized Montague Grammar by Robin Cooper, with each having its inadequacies.Adopting the Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) proposed by Pollard & Sag (1994) to be the theoretical framework, in this thesis, we attempt to describe and account for the quantifier scope ambiguities in English via the loaning of "Quantifier Inheritance Principle" and "Scope Principle" together with "Cooper storage" approach reconciled.According to the results of study from the perspective of HPSG, quantifier scope ambiguities can be precisely and accurately described and explained. Based on the analysis of the representative case "every student knows some poems", we argue that the derivation of scope ambiguity doesn't occur at the syntactic level, but at the semantic level.HPSG is "a non-derivational, constraint-based, surface oriented grammatical architecture", and its accountability for scope ambiguity is more powerful than any other derivational grammars. In addition, the lexicalism, which underlines the HPSG, roots from the study results of psycholinguistics, therefore HPSG to some extent avoids the incurring of criticism on the issue of "psychological reality". Further, consisting of abundant lexicon and universal principles, HPSG can describe and account for scope ambiguity more precisely and accurately, and that novel fresh approach, "concise syntactic rules, abundant lexicon", will inspire the studies in natural language processing and computational linguistics.We argue that HPSG present the process of semantic derivation of some scopally ambiguous sentences based on the monostratal analysis, and additionally the parsed translations of logic (not the integrated translations of logic) to account for quantifier scope ambiguities, provides us an important and enlightening linguistic method for coping with analogous ambiguities in natural language processing.