This book takes concepts developed by researchers in theoretical computer science and adapts and applies them to the study of natural language meaning. Summarizing over a decade of research, Chris Barker and Chung-chieh Shan put forward the Continuation Hypothesis: that the meaning of a natural language expression can depend on its own continuation

• Preface


• Notational conventions


• Acknowledgments


• Introduction


• Part I Towers: Scope and evaluation order


• 1: Scope and towers


• 2: Binding and crossover


• 3: From generalized quantifiers to dynamic meaning


• 4: Multi-level towers: Inverse scope


• 5: Movement as delayed evaluation: Wh-fronting


• 6: Reconstruction effects


• 7: Generalized coordination, Flexible Montague Grammar


• 8: Order effects in negative polarity licensing


• 9: Donkey anaphora and donkey crossover


• 10: Strategies for determiners


• 11: Other combinatory categorial frameworks


• 12: Computational connections


• Part II Logic, same, and sluicing


• 13: NL_¿


• 14: Parasitic scope for same


• 15: Scope versus discontinuity: Anaphora, VPE


• 16: Sluicing as anaphora to a continuation


• 17: Formal properties of NL_¿


• 18: Scope needs delimited continuations


• Afterword: The logic of evaluation order


• Notes on exercises


• References


• Index

Chris Barker is Professor of Linguistics at New York University. He has held positions at a number of universities, including 10 years at University of California, San Diego. His 1991 PhD thesis, 'Possessive Descriptions', was published in 1995 by CSLI, Stanford. He is the co-editor with Pauline Jacobson of Direct Compositionality (OUP 2007), the co-founder of semanticsarchive.net, and co-editor with Chris Kennedy of the series 'Oxford Surveys in Semantics and Pragmatics' and 'Oxford Studies in Semantics and Pragmatics'.
Chung-chieh Shan is Professor of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, and was previously Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University. He received his PhD in computer science in 2005 from Harvard University and has published articles in Linguistics and Philosophy, Journal of Logic, Language and Information, and Science of Computer Programming.