Semantic underspecification is a technique to capture several readings of an ambiguous expression in one single representation by deliberately omitting the differences between the readings in the representation. E.g., scope ambiguities like in the well-worn “Every man loves a woman” can be represented without enumerating the readings.
First, underspecification formalisms will be presented to introduce underspecification in general and to outline important properties of these formalisms that allow their classification into subgroups. After expounding the kinds of ambiguity to which underspecification can be applied, the seminar will then discuss various motivations for the use of underspecification, including challenging cases of semantic construction for surface-oriented syntactic analyses. |
