This book deals with the semantics of natural language expressions that are commonly taken to refer to individuals: pronouns, definite descriptions and proper names. It claims, contrary to previous theorizing, that they all have a common syntax and semantics, roughly that which is currently associated by philosophers and linguists with definite descriptions as construed in the tradition of Frege. As well as advancing this proposal, I hope to achieve at least one other aim, that of urging semanticists dealing with pronoun interpretation, in particular donkey anaphora, to consider a wider range of theories at all times than is sometimes done at present. I am thinking particularly of the gulf that seems to have emerged between those who practice some version of dynamic semantics (including DRT) and those who eschew this approach and rely on some version of the E-type analysis for donkey anaphora (if they consider this phenomenon at all). In my opinion there is too little work directly comparing the claims of these two schools (for that is what they amount to) and testing them against the data in the way that any two rival theories might be tested. (Irene Heim’s 1990 article in Linguistics and Philosophy does this, and

This paper investigates a new representation format for dynamic discourse in DRT, where contextual dynamics is modeled in terms of update conditions. This new representation format is motivated by the study of context dependence in modal constructions, in particular by serious problems besetting earlier approaches to modality and modal subordination in DRT. We present an alternative DRT analysis that provides a unified analysis of relative modality

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this paper however, we will use a graphic presentation, as in (2) above, which is easier to read than conjunctions of logical formulae. or it can extend it: (4) a. or the film got a good review in The Nation.

... this article. BAT is reformulated to meet requirements for computational implementation, which include operations on discourse representation structures (renaming and merging), the representation of presuppositions (allowing for selective binding and determining free and bound variables), and a formulation of the acceptability constraints imposed by BAT. An efficient presupposition resolution algorithm is presented, and several further improvements such as preferences for binding and accommodation are discussed and integrated in this algorithm. Finally, innovative use of first-order theorem provers to carry out consistency checking of discourse representations is investigated.

An incremental semantics for a logic with dynamic binding is developed on the basis of a variable free notation for dynamic logic. The variable free indexing mechanism guarantees that active registers are never overwritten by new quantifier actions. The resulting system has the same expressive power as Dynamic Predicate Logic or Discourse Representation Theory, but comes with a more well behaved consequence relation. A calculus for dynamic reasoning with anaphora is presented and its soundness and completeness are established. Incremental dynamic logic provides an explicit account of anaphoric context and yields new insight into the dynamics of anaphoric linking in reasoning. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: 03B65, 68Q55 1991 Computing Reviews Classification System: F.3.1, F.3.2, I.2.4, I.2.7 Keywords and Phrases: dynamic semantics of natural language, complete calculus for dynamic reasoning with anaphora, incremental interpretation, monotonic semantics, anaphora and context ...

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Abstract. Using a version of situation semantics, this article argues that bare and complex demonstratives are interpreted as individual concepts.

This paper focuses on the semantics of implicit arguments and compares it with that of explicit indefinites with which they can be truth-conditionally paraphrased. It is shown that once the discourse-potential of expressions is taken into account, the semantics of implicit arguments differs from their indefinite explicit counterparts. They are shown to be semantically identical to a particular kind of non-quantificational NP (a-definites) which are characterized by their inability to serve as antecedents for future reference. A model of this behavior of implicit arguments, it is argued, follows naturally from the underlying assumption of Discourse Representation Theory that semantic representations must include two kinds of information, a set of available discourse markers and a set of predicative conditions. Because implicit arguments satisfy a predicate's argument positions without introducing discourse markers into the Discourse Representation Structure of a sentence, they cannot serve as the antecedent of definite pronouns. When they do enter into anaphoric relations it is not through discourse markers equality clauses, but instead is the result of either lexical identification of variables (via semantic detransitivization or

In this paper, reasoning with ambiguous representations is explored in a formal way, with ambiguities at the level of propositions in propositional logic and predicate logic, and ambiguous representations of scopings in predicate logic as the main examples. First a version of propositional logic with propositional ambiguities is presented and a sequent axiomatization for it is given. This is then extended to predicate logic. Next, predicate logic with scope ambiguities is introduced and discussed, and again a sequent calculus for it is proposed. The conclusion connects the results to natural language semantics, and briefly compares them with existing logics of ambiguity. An appendix gives completeness proofs for our versions of ambiguous propositional and predicate logic. AMS Subject Classification (1991): 03B65, 03B80, 68S05, 68T30, 92K20. CR Subject Classification (1991): F.3.1, F.3.2, I.2.1, I.2.4, I.2.7. Keyword and Phrases: Semantics of Natural Language, Reasoning with Underspec...