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'SAME' IS A SCOPE-STEALER
Chris Barker UC-San Diego Thursday, October 20th, 12PM, MJH 126 Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center/Mellon Foundation Graduate Research Program The problem: `same' is core English, yet there has never been a fully compositional account of its contribution to truth conditions. (1) a. [Pointing at a book] Hey, John read the same book.
b. Mary and John read the same book. In (1a), `same' captures a property salient from the non-linguistic context. But (1b) has in addition a so-called sentence-internal reading, on which it asserts merely that there there exists some book x such that Mary read x and John read x. As Carlson (1985, Linguistics and Philosophy) puts it, "the sentence, in some way or other, provides its own context". But how?? The solution: First, I claim that "same" is a quantificational, scope-taking adjective. This can be seen more clearly in examples such as "two men with the same name", in which "same" takes scope over the nominal "men with the __ name". The harder part of the solution is characterizing the astonishing range of semantic environments that can provide a suitable scope for "same", including the following: (2) a. Everyone read the same book. [quantificational DP]
b. John praised and criticized the same book. [conjoined V] c. John read the same book every Sunday. [quantificational Adv] In the case of (2a), I will argue that the scope of "same" turns out to be ... the scope of "everyone"! Using a derivational metaphor, "same" waits patiently till "everyone" takes scope, then pounces, hijacking the nuclear scope of "everyone" for its own purposes. I will conclude that arriving at a unified, fully compositional treatment of "same" requires a deeper understanding of what counts as a semantic context, as well as new formal techniques for calculating such contexts. 
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