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<Paper uid="P98-1089">
  <Title>Parsing Parallel Grammatical Representations</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> It has long been recognized that the possibility and preference rankings of scope readings depend to a great degree on the position of scope-taking elements in the surface string (Chomsky, 1975; Hobbs and Shieber, 1987). Yet most traditional accounts of semantic scopal phenomena in natural language have not directly tied these two factors together. Instead, they allow only certain derivations to link the surface structure of a sentence with the representational level at which scope relations are determined, place constraints upon the semantic feature-passing mechanism, or otherwise emulate a constraint which requires some degree of congruence between the surface syntax of a sentence and its preferred scope reading(s).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> A simpler and more direct approach is suggested by constraint-based, multistratal theories of grammar (Grimshaw, 1997; Jackendoff, 1997; Sadock, 1991; Van Valin, 1993). In these models, it is possible to posit multiple representational levels for a sentence without according ontological primacy to any one of them, as in all varieties of transformational grammar. This allows constraints to be formulated which place limits on structural discrepancies between levels, yet need not be assimilated into an overriding derivational mechanism.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This paper will examine the model of one of these theories, Autolexical Grammar (Sadock, 1991; Sadock, 1996; Schiller et al., 1996), as it is implemented in a computational scope generator and critic. This left-corner chart parser generates surface syntactic structures for each sentence (as the only level of syntactic representation), as well as Function-Argument semantic structures and Quantifier/Operator-Scope structures. These latter two structures together determine the semantic interpretation of a sentence. null It will be shown that this model is both categorical enough to handle standard generalizations about quantifier scope, such as bans on extraction from certain domains, and fuzzy enough to present reasonable preference rankings among scopings and account for lexical differences in quantifier strength (Hobbs and Shieber, 1987; Moran, 1988).</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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