tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "MULTI-LEVEL PLURALS AND DISTRIBUTIVITY"

"collective" verb. The collective/distributive distinction raises an important issue: how to treat the semantics of plural NPs uniformly. An eadiar paper by Scha ("Distributive, Collective and Cumulative Quantification" [7], hereinafter "DCC") presented a formal treatment of this issue which exploits an idea about the semantics of plural NP's which is due to Bartsch [1]: plural NP's are a l w a y s interpreted as quantifying over sets rather than individuals; verbs are correspondingly always treated as collective predicates applying to sets. . | MULTI-LEVEL PLURALS AND DISTRIBUTIVE Remko Scha and David Stallard BBN Laboratories Inc. 10 Moulton St. Cambridge MA 02238 . ABSTRACT We present a computational treatment of the semantics of plural Noun Phrases which extends an earlier approach presented by Scha 7 to be able to deal with multiple-level plurals the boys and the girls the juries and the committees etc. 1 We argue that the arbitrary depth to which such plural structures can be nested creates a correspondingly arbitrary ambiguity in the possibilities for the distribution of verbs over such NPs. We present a recursive translation rule scheme which accounts for this ambiguity and in particular show how it allows for the option of partial distributivity that collective verbs have when applied to such plural Noun Phrases. 1 INTRODUCTION Syntactically parallel utterances which contain plural noun phrases often require entirely different semantic treatments depending upon the particular verbs or adjectives or prepositions that these plural NPs are combined with. For example while the sentence The boys walk would have truth-conditions expressed by 2 Vxe BOYS WALKft the very similar sentence The boys gather could not be translated this way. Its truth-conditions would instead have to be expressed by something like GATHERfBOYS since only a group can gather not one person by himself. It is common to call a verb such as walk a distributive verb while a verb such as gather or disperse or intransitive meet is called a The work presented here was supported under DARPA contracts 4N00014-85-C-0016 and N00014-87-C-0085. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies either expressed or implied of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or the United States Government. 2We ignore here the discourse issues that bear on the interpretation of definite NPs collective verb. The collective distributive .