us with adequate answers. The puzzles I am referring to have to do with
the intricacies of anaphoric linking. What is the mechanism behind ordinary
cross-sentential anaphora, as in ‘Harry has a cat. He feeds it’ ? Is it essentially
the same mechanism as the one that is at work in the case of temporal
anaphora? How is it possible that in Geach’s notorious ‘donkey’ sentences,
such as ‘If a farmer owns a donkey, he beats it’, the noun phrase ‘a farmer’
is linked to the anaphoric pronoun ‘it’ without its having scope over the
conditional and why is it that the noun phrase is interpreted as a universal
quantifier, not as an existential one?
While it has turned out rather fruitless to study these and similar ques-
tions within classical Montague Grammar (MG), they can be studied prof-
itably within the framework of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT, see
Heim [1982, 1983], Kamp [1981], Kamp & Reyle [1993]). This semantic the-
ory offers interesting analyses of the phenomena that were mentioned above
and many researchers in the field now adopt some form of DRT as the for-
malism underlying their semantical investigations.
But the shift of paradigm seems to have its drawbacks too. Barwise
[1987] and Rooth [1987], for example, observe that the new theory does not
give us the nice unified account of noun phrases as generalized quantifiers
that Montague’s approach had to offer and it is also clear from Kamp &
Reyle [1993] that the standard DRT treatment of coordination in arbitrary
categories cannot claim the elegance of the Montagovian treatment. For the
purposes of this paper a third consequence of the paradigm shift is important.
The Curry-Howard-Van Benthem method of providing Lambek proofs with
meanings requires that meanings be expressed as typed lambda terms. Since
this is not the case in standard DRT, the latter has no natural interface with
Lambek Categorial Grammar.
It seems then that the niceties of MG and DRT have a complementary
distribution and that considerable advantages could be gained from merging
the two, provided that the best of both worlds can be retained in the merge.
In fact the last eight years have witnessed a growing convergence between
the two semantic frameworks. The articles by Barwise and Rooth that were
mentioned above are early examples of this trend. Other important examples
are Zeevat [1989] and Groenendijk & Stokhof [1990, 1991].
None of these papers gives the combination of DRT and type logic that
is needed for attaching the first to Lambek’s calculus, but in Muskens [forth-
coming] it was shown how the necessary fusion can be obtained. The es-
sential observation is that the meanings of DRT’s discourse representation