Abstract not found

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

Accounts of information packaging (focus-ground, theme-rheme, topic-comment) in the pragmatic tradition are inherently dynamic in that they are concerned with the linguistic processes by means of which information is presented to an updating agent in discourse. The main insight gained from this line of research is that, in discourse, speakers not only present information to their interlocutors, but also provide them with detailed `instructions' on how to manipulate and integrate this information. The use of these instructions reveals that speakers treat information states as highly structured objects and exploit their structure to make information update more efficient for their hearers. The analysis of information packaging acts as a valuable probe into the nature of linguistic information update and the structure of information states.

This paper concerns treatment of variables in a dynamic semantics. The main empirical concern will be the interaction of presupposition and quantification, but I will also consider how epistemic modals and quantifiers combine. I will show how these empirical considerations motivate a choice between two styles of quantification. The first of these styles involves treating quantified variables rather like discourse markers, whereas the second style gives variables a more classical interpretation. I will argue for the second, more conservative option

This paper concerns the relevance of notions of sentence topic and discourse topic to the analysis of sentences containing presuppositions. Firstly I consider sentences where quantificational determiners quantify-in to presuppositions. By considering texts containing such sentences, I show that intermediate accommodation cannot be triggered by presuppositions, contrary to the predictions of van der Sandt's recent model. However, a process I refer to as topical accommodation could justify the existence of the readings predicted by van der Sandt's model in some cases. I then show that similar problems occur in the treatment of presuppositions occurring in the consequents of conditionals, and once again conclude that current models err by not taking into account topic-focus articulation and issues of discourse coherency.

Expressives like d.mn and b.stard have, when uttered, an immediate and powerful impact on the context. They are performative, often destructively so. They are revealing of the perspective from which the utterance is made, and they can have a dramatic impact on how current and future utterances are perceived. This, despite the fact that speakers are invariably hard-pressed to articulate what they mean. I develop a general theory of these volatile, indispensable meanings. The theory is built around a class of expressive indices. These determine the expressive setting of the context of interpretation. Expressives morphemes act on that context, actively changing its expressive setting. The theory is multidimensional in the sense that descriptives and expressives are fundamentally different but receive a unified logical treatment.

this paper, and to the audience of IWCS-II (1997), in particular Jerry Hobbs and Nicholas Asher, for comments and questions. Paul Piwek was partially funded by the co-oporation unit of Brabant universities (SOBU). The authors are mentioned in alphabetical order.

The complexity of any logical modeling reflects both the intrinsic structure of a topic described and the weight of the formal tools. Some of this weight seems inherent in even the most basic logical systems. Notably, standard predicate logic is undecidable. In this paper, we investigate `lighter' versions of this general purpose tool, by modally `deconstructing' the usual semantics, and locating implicit choice points in its set up. The first part sets out the interest of this program and the modal techniques employed, while the second part provides technical elaborations demonstrating its viability. Keywords: quantifier, variable, dependency, modality, cylindric algebra 1 The modal core of predicate logic The well-known standard semantics for predicate logic has the following key clause: M; a j= 9xOE iff for some d 2 jMj : M; ff x d j= OE: Tarsk's main innovation here was the use of assignments, which are essential in decomposing quantified statements, which leave free variabl...

The linguistic subfields of semantics and pragmatics are both concerned with the study of meaning. We might say that semantics studies what Grice (1967) called the TIMELESS MEANING of a linguistic expression φ —the basic meanings of the words in φ composed as a function of the syntactic structure of φ. Formal semantics, especially since the seminal work of Montague (1973), attempts to develop an empirically adequate theory of semantics for a given language by developing rules that are clear and unambiguous in their application and effect, and in so doing, makes clear predictions about the possible meanings for a given expression. Semanticists assume that words do have basic meanings, and that a given syntactic structure corresponds with a determinate way of composing the meanings of its subparts. 1 Pragmatics, on the other hand, studies utterances of expressions like φ, attempting to explain WHAT SOMEONE MEANT BY SAYING φ ON A PARTICULAR OCCASION. It is clear that there is quite often a difference between the timeless meaning of φ and what someone meant by uttering φ on a given occasion. It is a truism among native speakers that this difference arises because of the way that the context of utterance influences interpretation. We complain if someone quotes what we say out of context because this may well distort our intended meaning. But what is a context of utterance, and how does it influence interpretation? A linguistic interchange is generally called a discourse, hence the problem of understanding

This paper is concerned with the contrast between two kinds of sentences involving definite descriptions. When people are asked to assign truth-values, they feel "squeamish" about The King of France is bald, while they confidently and without hesitation judge My friend went for a drive with the King of France last week to be false. This contrast has often been taken to show that the first sentence has no truth-value because its presupposition (that there is a King of France) is not satisfied, while the second sentence has no presupposition of existence (of a King of France) and is thus simply false. I will