THE FIRST SEMANTICS WORKSHOP OF THE 1997-98 SEASON!
 
 		1:00 p.m., Wednesday, October 15th
 
 		   Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg. 460)
 			     Room 146
 
 
 EVENT CONSTRUAL AND QUANTIFICATION
 
 Henk J. Verkuyl
 Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS
 
 
 This talk may be understood as a reaction to an approach
 visible in the two papers making up the last issue of
 Linguistics and Philosophy, written by Tanya Reinhart
 and by Yoad Winter. Both want to replace certain
 readings with wide scope for indefinite NPs by choice
 ofunctions. Reinhart's point of departure is the
 standard generative way to analyze ambiguity in
 terms of scopal shift, which she seems to accept but
 for the problems solved in terms of choice functions
 I will argue that her point departure is wrong, so
 that she solves a problem for an artifact.
 First order standard predicate logic suffers from an
 abstraction from all sorts of aspects of sentential
 structure, most prominently among which temporal structure.
 From the point of view of a compositional aspectual and
 quantificational framework, an extension of the Plural
 Grammar made by Jaap van der Does and myself, I will
 argue that the same sort of dependency underlying the
 relation between "Every farmer" and "a donkey" in the
 well-known donkey-sentence "Every farmer who owns a
 donkey, beats it"--a dependency which blocks a direct
 existential interpretation of "a donkey"--, underlies the
 interpretation of sentences like "Three girls lifted
 a table" or "All girls lifted some tables". In other
 words, we find a similar dependency in all sentences
 of the form NP VP: the internal argument being
 contained by the VP is crucially dependent on the external
 argument. Therefore, there is no direct interpretation
 of "a table" or "some tables" in terms of a wide
 scope existential quantifier (for generativists including
 QR).
 
 This blocks all analyses based on scopal shift,
 including those from event semantics.
 I will present alternatives to scopal shift analyses
 based on the conviction that taking into account
 temporal structure in the analysis of sentences,
 requires a drastic revision of certain default
 assumptions concerning the application of tools
 from first order standard predicate logic to the
 area of ambiguous interpretations.