Ambiguity of Pronouns: A Simple Case

Abstract

In formal logics one is accustomed to associating with each syntactic feature a semantic feature; the semantic interpretation of a sentence parallels the syntactic structure of the sentence in a direct way. In contrast, semantic interpretations of sentences of natural languages, for example, English, have, in transformational grammars, taken place on translations of those sentences into some language similar to the languages of formal logic. It is instructive to attempt semantic interpretation of “surface” sentences of English directly. Richard Montague made some progress in this direction, especially in his treatment of quantifiers in subject and object position of English sentences (Montague 1973). One of the major difficulties facing a direct semantic interpretation of English is ambiguity. Montague simply relativizes semantic interpretations to syntactic structure: what is interpreted is always a sentence together with a syntactic analysis of that sentence. In some cases Montague’s syntactic analyses are so rich that they begin to blur the distinction between his approach and that of transformational grammarians. The present paper attempts to treat ambiguity in quite a different way from Montague, though very much in the spirit of viewing English as a formal language.