Assignment

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Due on Wednesday, November 12th.

Part 1

Provide a lexical entry for or that accounts for its occurrence in the sentence in (1), and give a derivation for (1).

1. Tigress or Po jumped.

Make sure that you unfold any relevant definitions gotten from the scheme discussed in A general rule, and that you end up with a representation of a truth value as the meaning of (1).

Part 2

In addition to subject noun phrases, we can also coordinate object noun phrases, as in (2).

2. Mantis punched Tigress and Po.

Provide lexical entries for Tigress and Po that account for this fact, as well as the fact that (2) entails (3), and vice versa.

3. Mantis punched Tigress and Mantis punched Po.

The basic idea here is that you want an object noun phrase to take a transitive verb and give something back.

You don’t need to provide a derivation of (2) for this exercise, but it might help to!

Part 3

The sentence in (4) is ambiguous; that is, it has two possible interpretations, or readings.

4. Tigress and Po jumped or slept.

On one reading, both Tigress and Po have to have done the same thing—that is, they both jumped or they both slept. To get at this reading, you might follow up (4) by saying, “Tigress and Po jumped or slept—but I don’t know which one they both did.” Call this reading of the sentence in (4) Reading A.

There is another reading of (4), however, which is weaker than Reading A. On this other reading, (4) can be true if Tigress and Po both did one of the two activities of jumping and sleeping, but not necessarily the same one. For example, maybe Tigress only jumped, while Po only slept. It seems like (4) can still be true in this scenario—it just means something different. Call this Reading B.

Do the assumptions we have made about the meanings of and, or, and subject noun phrases allow us to account for the existence of both Reading A and Reading B? Or can we only explain one or the other? One way to figure out an answer to this question is by providing a derivation for (4).