Scope Parallelism in Coordination in Dependent Type Semantics

The scope parallelism in the so-called Geach sentences in right-node raising (Every boy admires, and every girl detests, some saxophonist) poses a difficult challenge to many analyses of right-node raising, including ones formulated in the type-logical variants of categorial grammar (e.g. Kubota and Levine (2015)). In this paper, we first discuss Steedman’s (2012) solution to this problem in Combinatory Categorial Grammar, and point out some empirical problems for it. We then propose a novel analysis of the Geach problem within Hybrid Type-Logical Categorial Grammar (Kubota and Levine 2015), by incorporating Dependent Type Semantics (Bekki 2014) as the semantic component of the theory. The key solution for the puzzle consists in linking quantifiers to the argument positions that they correspond to via an anaphoric process. Independently motivated mechanisms for anaphora resolution in DTS then automatically predicts the scope parallelism in Geach sentences as a consequence of binding parallelism independently observed in right-node raising sentences.