Type-based underspecification

Abstract

Abstract This chapter gives an account of how TTR types can be used to talk of content which is underspecified. The idea is to exploit the notion of types which can have several witnesses as “underspecifications” of those witnesses. Rather than associating contents with utterances as we have done in the earlier chapters, we associate types of contents with utterances. Thus a dialogue participant when observing a speech event associates it with a type of content rather than a particular content. We show how earlier ideas about the treatment of underspecification of quantifier scope and anaphora can be accommodated in this view