On Reasoning with Ambiguities

TL;DR

This paper introduces semantic representations that handle ambiguities in reasoning by leaving scope relations unspecified, providing truth conditions and inference patterns that operate directly on these underspecified structures.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach to reasoning with ambiguities using underspecified semantic representations and inference patterns that do not require disambiguation.

Findings

Semantic representations with unspecified scope relations are feasible.

Truth conditions for these representations are established.

Inference patterns operate directly on underspecified structures.

Abstract

The paper adresses the problem of reasoning with ambiguities. Semantic representations are presented that leave scope relations between quantifiers and/or other operators unspecified. Truth conditions are provided for these representations and different consequence relations are judged on the basis of intuitive correctness. Finally inference patterns are presented that operate directly on these underspecified structures, i.e. do not rely on any translation into the set of their disambiguations.