"Different" as a Restriction on Skolem Functions

Abstract

An analysis of different as in every child watched a different movie is developed that is based on an analysis of indefinites in terms of Skolemised choice functions. The internal reading of the sentence, which expresses that the movies covary with the children, is analysed as stating that the children can be mapped injectively to movies they watched. This is achieved by letting the Skolemised choice function that interprets the indefinite pick, for each child, an element from the set of movies that the same function does not assign to any other individual, which allows for analysing different in a manner parallelling ordinary intersective adjectives. Simply replacing this set of movies with the set of contextually salient movies then also gives the external reading. An implementation at the syntax-semantics interface is provided, employing Lexical Resource Semantics.