Coppock presents commentary on Hans Kamp’s paper at Princeton-Rutgers Semantics Workshop

At the 2026 Princeton-Rutgers Semantics Workshop, Elizabeth Coppock presented commentary on Hans Kamp’s paper on Russell’s Ambiguity.

Abstract:
There are three main strategies that have been proposed for deriving the ambiguity in Russell’s famous example, where a guest says to the touchy owner of a yacht, I thought your yacht was longer than it is (to which the owner replies, No, my yacht is not longer than it is). Two involve scope movement, either of the comparative element -er along with the than-clause, or of just the latter. An alternative is ‘double-indexing’, for example with an `actually’-operator. The talk takes stock of the advantages and disadvantages of the various alternatives, and concludes that none of them captures the full range of facts. We are apparently left with an open question about this more than century-old example.

Slides available here.