Quantification and Syntactic Theory

by Robin Cooper

The format of this book is unusual, especially for a book about linguistics. The book is meant primarily as a research monograph aimed at linguists who have some background in formal semantics, e. g. Montague Grammar. However, I have two other audiences in mind. Linguists who have little or no experience of formal semantics, but who have worked through a basic mathematics for linguists course (e. g. using Wall, 1972, or Partee, 1978), should, perhaps with the help of a sympathetic Montague gramma­ rian, be able to discover enough of how I have adapted some of the basic ideas in formal semantics to make the developments that I undertake in the rest of the book accessible. Logicians and computer scientists who know about model theoretic semantics and formal systems should be able to glean enough from Chapters I and II about linguistic concerns and techniques to be able to read the remainder of the book, again possibly with the help of a sympathetic Montague grammarian. However, readers should beware. Chapter II is not meant as a general introduction either to formal semantics or to linguistics and while much of the presentation there is going over ground that is already well covered in the literature, the particular formulation and the emphases are very much oriented to the developments to be undertaken later in the book.

Genres: Linguistics

230 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 1983

About the author

Robert Popper is a multi-award winning writer, producer and performer, and best-selling author.

Robert produced Peep Show for Channel 4, winning a BAFTA for series 4 and British Comedy Awards for both series 3 and 4. With Peter Serafinowicz, Robert created, starred in and composed the music for the BBC 2 spoof science comedy, Look Around You, winning the Rose D’or for Best Comedy in 2006 plus a BAFTA nomination.

Robert has written on a number of shows, including BBC’s BAFTA-winning Harry & Paul, and The Peter Serafinowicz Show. He has also script-edited some of the country’s most exciting comedy programmes, including the multi award-winning The Inbetweeners, Graham Linehan’s EMMY award-winning IT Crowd, Peep Show series 5, 6 & 7 and Him & Her.

As a Commissioning Editor for comedy at Channel 4, Robert commissioned Bo’ Selecta!, helped develop The IT Crowd, oversaw two series of Black Books, as well as series 2 of Spaced, and ran Comedy Labs.

Under his pseudonym, Robin Cooper, he wrote The Timewaster Letters books, which have so far sold over 300,000 copies.

Robert apperared regularly on Charlie Higson & Paul Whitehouse’s Sony Award-winning Radio 4 series, Down the Line, as well as their BBC2 show, Bellamy’s People. He also appeared in Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright’s movie, Hot Fuzz, saying just three words – “I’m not Janine”, and worked in Los Angeles as a writer on Sacha Baron Cohen’s movie, Bruno.

In December 2008, Robert set up his own production company, Popper Pictures, to make comedy TV shows.

Robert and Peter created the online afterlife comedy, The Other Side (Radio Spiritworld), as well as the online world religion, Tarvuism (www.tarvu.com).

In 2010, Robert wrote on series 14 of South Park in LA. His six part comedy series, Friday Night Dinner – starring Tamsin Greig, Simon Bird, Paul Ritter, Tom Rosenthal and Mark Heap – which Robert wrote and produced – aired on Channel 4 in 2011, winning the Rose D’or for Best Sitcom and a BAFTA nomination.

A pilot of Friday Night Dinner was recently produced in the US for NBC by Greg Daniels, creator of King of The Hill, and US producer of The Office. Robert recently starred alongside Steve Coogan in Sky’s forthcoming ‘Alan Partidge on Open Books’ which goes out in July. The second series of Friday Night Dinner starts on Channel 4 on October 7th, along with a Christmas Special at – well, Christmas.

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

The next slide is going to show you a sign I saw last week in a shop window in Venice. Please look at this for a moment:



Now, can anyone... ah, as usual, the gentleman at the front. Yes, very good, as you point out it suggests that scoping rules are probably not quite the same in Italian and English. Excellent.

For the benefit of the people who didn't read the assignment, let's take that one step at a time. First, would someone like to give me the two different scopings of the sentence? That is correct, one of them can indeed be paraphrased as "For all X, you see X here implies that X is not made in China". Let's be charitable and assume that was the intended scoping. And the other one is... yes, you. Also correct! "It is not the case that, for all X, you see X here implies that X is made in China."

So, who would like to explain why the example is amusing? The young lady on the left? Well, that is almost right, since negation does generally prefer to take wide scope. But note that it is only a preference. Thus while the second, presumably unintended, reading is the preferred one, the first, presumably intended, reading is still available. Hence we know what the sign writer meant to say, and also how he got it wrong. Very droll, I think you'll all agree?

Is that the bell already? Now, before next Tuesday, I want everyone to have read the next chapter of Cooper and be ready to explain in formal terms the structure of the following joke:

Every sixty seconds, a man is knocked down by a car on a road somewhere in England.

And he's getting pretty pissed off about it.

You have all weekend to hone your arguments. Class dismissed.