Branching Quantifiers

This chapter is devoted to a particularly intriguing quantifier construction: branching. Branching interpretations of some natural language sentences are intractable, and therefore, their occurrence in natural language is far from obvious. I start by discussing the thesis formulated by Hintikka, which says that certain natural language sentences require nonlinear quantification to express their meaning. Then, I discuss a novel alternative reading for potentially branching sentences, the so-called two-way reading. This reading is expressible by a linear formula and is tractable. I compare the two-way reading to other possible interpretations and argue that it is the best representation for the meaning of Hintikka-like sentences. Next, I describe an experiment providing empirical support for the two-way reading. The basic assumption here is that a criterion for the adequacy of a meaning representation is its compatibility with sentence truth-conditions. This can be established by observi...