Editing Continuation (section)

==Linguistics==

In "Continuations and the nature of quantification", [[Chris Barker (linguist)|Chris Barker]] introduced the "continuation hypothesis", that
<blockquote>
some linguistic expressions (in particular, QNPs [quantificational noun phrases]) have denotations that manipulate their own continuations.<ref>Chris Barker, [http://www.semanticsarchive.net/Archive/902ad5f7/barker.continuations.pdf Continuations and the nature of quantification], 2002 Natural Language Semantics 10:211-242.</ref>
</blockquote>
Barker argued that this hypothesis could be used to explain phenomena such as ''duality of NP meaning'' (e.g., the fact that the QNP "everyone" behaves very differently from the non-quantificational noun phrase "Bob" in contributing towards the meaning of a sentence like "Alice sees [Bob/everyone]"), ''scope displacement'' (e.g., that "a raindrop fell on every car" is interpreted typically as <math>\forall c \exists r, \mbox{fell}(r,c)</math> rather than as <math>\exists r \forall c, \mbox{fell}(r,c)</math>), and ''scope ambiguity'' (that a sentence like "someone saw everyone" may be ambiguous between <math>\exists x \forall y, \mbox{saw}(x,y)</math> and <math>\forall y \exists x, \mbox{saw}(x,y)</math>).  He also observed that this idea is in a way just a natural extension of [[Montague grammar|Richard Montague's approach]] in "The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English" (PTQ), writing that "with the benefit of hindsight, a limited form of continuation-passing is clearly discernible at the core of Montague’s (1973) PTQ treatment of NPs as generalized quantifiers".

The extent to which continuations can be used to explain other general phenomena in natural language is a topic of current research.<ref>See for example Chris Barker,  [http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~hxt/cw04/barker.pdf Continuations in Natural Language] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070824024332/http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~hxt/cw04/barker.pdf |date=2007-08-24 }} (Continuations Workshop 2004), or Chung-chieh Shan,  [http://homes.soic.indiana.edu/ccshan/brown/paper.pdf Linguistic Side Effects]
(in "Direct compositionality,'' ed. Chris Barker and Pauline Jacobson, pp. 132-163, Oxford University Press, 2007).</ref>