This book takes concepts developed by researchers in theoretical computer science and
adapts and applies them to the study of natural language meaning. Summarizing more than …

I argue that alternative-denoting expressions interact with their semantic context by taking
scope. With an empirical focus on indefinites in English, I show how this approach improves …

I motivate a new theory of exceptional scope phenomena in natural language—that is, the
ability of some expressions to affect the interpretation of others from inside scope islands. I …

Monads are commonplace in computer science, and can be composed using Beck's
distributive laws. Unfortunately, finding distributive laws can be extremely difficult and error …

This paper presents syntactic and semantic rules for a fragment of English with mixed
quotation. The fragment shows that quotation has a recursive and compositional structure …

Apparently noncompositional phenomena in natural languages can be analyzed like
computational side effects in programming languages: anaphora can be analyzed like state …

Distributive universals are unique among natural language quantifiers in the following three
ways:(i) matrix interrogatives that contain them accept pair-list answers;(ii) indefinites and …

This paper proposes a formal account of indefinites' exceptional quantificational and binding
scope properties—static and dynamic exceptional scope. I show how minimal dynamic …

The construction of natural language interfaces to computers continues to be a major
challenge. The need for such interfaces is growing now that speech recognition technology …

The book examines to what extent the mediating relation between constituents and their
semantics can arise from combinatory knowledge of words. It traces the roots of …