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Structured contexts and anaphoric dependencies

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Abstract

Sensitivity to the extra-linguistic context, as exhibited by indexical and demonstrative expressions, and sensitivity to the linguistic context, as exhibited by, for example, anaphoric uses of third person pronouns, are regularly regarded as different and independent phenomena. The data on indexicals, demonstratives, and third person pronouns, however, call for a more unified notion of context and of context sensitivity. This paper aims to develop such a unified picture by generalizing the notion of anaphora to encompass extra-linguistic context dependency and generalizing the notion of a structured discourse context so that contexts contain antecedents for expressions that refer to entities in the extra-linguistic context.

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Notes

  1. Here and throughout, I use the term indexical to refer to those expressions, including I, here, now, tomorrow, and so on, that Kaplan (1989) called pure indexicals. I use the term demonstratives to refer to expressions that Kaplan classified as (impure) indexicals, but which, like this and that, must be accompanied by a demonstration. Of course, some expressions, might arguably fall into both categories; here, for example, can be used like a pure indexical when used without a demonstration to talk about the place of utterance, but it can also be used like a demonstrative as when someone points at a part of a map and says, ‘I want to go here on our next vacation’. For this reason, it might be better to talk about indexical and demonstrative uses of these expressions, but I will continue to refer to these expressions simply as indexicals and demonstratives where doing so should not cause confusion.

  2. While the fact that many expressions classified as indexicals often do not conform to Kaplan’s predictions seems to be generally accepted, the list of work that confronts this problem directly is limited. See Altshuler (2010), Hunter (2010, 2013), Kamp and Reyle (1993), Nunberg (1993), Recanati (2004) for some explicit discussion.

  3. Variation on example from ‘Will Obama Ask Kaine to Seek Virginia Senate Seat?’, The New York Times, 10.02.2011.

  4. Project Canterbury, The Little Lives of the Saints, told by Percy Dearmer and illustrated by Charles Robinson. London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., 1904. http://anglicanhistory.org/dearmer/lives/06.html.

  5. This example is arguably difficult to process. I think, however, that the difficulty lies in our ability to understand multiply embedded modal statements, rather than in actual’s ability to depend on non-actual possible worlds.

  6. In addition to the arguably anaphoric uses of indexicals given in (1)–(3), some data suggest that indexicals can have bound readings too. In example (a), the second occurrence of you has both a referential and a bound reading; example (b) is naturally read as a generic claim in which you appears to be bound rather than (purely) referential; and in (c), now is bound by the when-clause.

    1. (a)

      Only you eat what you cook. (Kratzer 2009)

    2. (b)

      When you have a toddler, it’s hard to keep your house clean.

    3. (c)

      When death is present in a household on a Christmas Day, the very contrast between the time as it now is, and the day as it has often been, gives a poignancy to sorrow,—a more utter blankness to the desolation. (From “Lizzie Leigh” by Elizabeth Gaskell. Thanks to Peter Fritz for this example.)

    Examples like (c) are of course rare—far rarer than examples like (1)–(3)—and one might disagree that my and you in (a) and (b) should be analyzed as cases of true binding. Still, these examples appear to offer further support for (C) and the claim that the differences in interpretive possibilities between indexicals and third person pronouns are not as clear cut as is commonly believed.

  7. See Anand (2006), Kamp and Reyle (1993), Maier (2006), Schlenker (2003) and Sells (1987) for some discussion.

  8. Kaplan (1989) and Kamp (1971) are well-known examples of philosophical theories of indexicals that focus on utterance contexts. Kamp and Reyle (1993) and Groenendijk and Stokhof (1991), both of which I will appeal to in this paper, offer accounts of discourse context sensitivity that focus on (traditionally) anaphoric uses of third-person pronouns.

  9. Kaplan doesn’t actually discuss the meaning of anaphoric expressions in any detail, but it is clear that his contexts and his notion of character are not—and cannot be—designed to handle these expressions.

  10. (L) is adapted from Kaplan (1989) and Maier (2006, 2009). Maier’s principle L is in turn adapted from Zimmerman (2004)’s Hypothesis L. Maier’s formulation is: “an expression’s reference either depends on the context and is intensionally rigid, or has intensional content but is contextually inert....and which of the two, is specified by the (L)exicon”. Kaplan’s original claim, from p. 506 of Kaplan (1989), is this: “Indexicals have a context-sensitive character. It is characteristic of an indexical that its content varies with context. Non-indexicals have a fixed character. The same content is evoked in all contexts. This content will typically be sensitive to circumstances, that is, the non-indexicals are typically not-rigid designators but will vary in extension from circumstance to circumstance.” For more discussion on how an assumption like (L) underlies Kaplan’s two-dimensional account, see Dever (2004) and Hunter (2013).

  11. I.e. truth-conditional content or dynamic update content. I will ultimately adopt a dynamic semantic theory, according to which the above sentence can be restated as follows: ‘its dependence on the context is such that should a context fail to provide an appropriate antecedent, update with the pronoun will not be successful in the sense that update will yield the empty information state’. The points I am making here do not hang on a notion of dynamic update, however, so I will continue to use the more general term ‘semantic content’.

  12. The term ‘implicit anaphora’ as I am using it here comes from King (2011). King borrowed the term from Higginbotham (1997), who uses the term for a slightly different purpose. King uses examples from Nunberg (1993) involving quantificational adverbs to motivate implicit anaphora. Consider a situation in which two people are looking at a picture of the Pope dressed in his habit and clearly engaging in papal duties. One can point at the Pope and say:

    1. (4)

      He’s usually Italian.

    to mean the Pope is usually Italian. In this way, he in (4) functions as it does in the examples below, taken from King’s presentation:

    1. (5)

      The Pope1 is the head of the Roman Catholic Church. He1’s usually Italian.

    2. (6)

      The \(\hbox{Pope}_1\ldots he_1\)’s usually Italian

    In treating the dependence of he on the role of the Pope in (4) as an example of implicit anaphora, King acknowledges the similarity between the mechanism at work in (4) and that at work in standard anaphoric examples. The difference between the cases is, of course, that the antecedent for he in (4) is not introduced explicitly via the linguistic context, but rather implicitly in virtue of the extra-linguistic context making the role of the Pope salient. King does not push the idea of implicit anaphora any further. He does not, for example, suggest treating standard demonstrative uses of he as examples of implicit anaphora. But why shouldn’t we take this extra step? Imagine that the extra-linguistic context is exactly the same as it was for (4), but this time the speaker chooses to say something about the current Pope instead of the role of the Pope:

    1. (4′)

      He is not Italian.

    Surely the Pope himself is every bit as salient in this situation as the role of the Pope and the speaker is free to pick up on either one. If we posit implicit anaphora for the first case, why not the second? Assuming King’s proposal is a reasonable one, examples like (4) provide another motivation for my claim that dependence on the extra-linguistic context of the sort exhibited by indexicals and demonstratives is an example of implicit anaphora. Of course, the fact that indexicals are not as open to finding antecedents from the linguistic context needs to be explained, but this fact doesn’t entail that we should construe extra-linguistic context dependence and linguistic context dependence as involving different semantic mechanisms.

  13. Kamp (2010) argues that we must impose further structure in our contextual representations. His “articulated contexts” also make room for the representation of world knowledge, which is partitioned off from both perceptual information and information from the linguistic context. While a discussion of further types of contextual information would take us too far afield, Kamp’s arguments for articulated contexts offer further support for the distinction between K0 and K1 that I am defending here. His treatment of indexicals, however, is a straightforward adaptation of Kaplan’s theory in DRT, and is as such in opposition to the main arguments of this paper.

  14. In a weak sense, we might say that interpreters who were not around to witness, say, an utterance event will accommodate the information that such an event occurred, but see Zeevat (1999) for arguments that this is not true accommodation in the sense normally used when talking about presupposition.

  15. I am adapting van der Sandt’s treatment for my purposes; he did not discuss indexicals, nor did he have anything like K0 in his system.

  16. The idea of context sensitive expressions having different strategies for finding their antecedents is supported by work on the Referential or Givenness Hierarchy (see Ariel 2006; Gundel et al. 1993; Zeevat 2002).

  17. The conditions under which a given indexical or demonstrative expression can find an antecedent in K1 and below may vary from one indexical to the other. Tokens of English I, for example, appear to always find their antecedents in K0, while now, here and actual(ly) appear to be able to find antecedents in lower contexts. For further discussion of the conditions that must obtain for now and actual/ly to find an antecedent in K0 or below, see Hunter and Asher (2005) and Hunter (2012a).

  18. To capture the way the above exchange would affect an information state, we would need a theory that could handle corrections. See Asher and Lascarides (2003) for one such framework.

  19. Keep in mind that the incoming context could in principle be empty. Assuming the expression to be evaluated does not contain context-sensitive elements, evaluation relative to an empty context, i.e. a context including all possible world-assignment pairs, would give the closest approximation of a classical proposition.

  20. We could just as easily start with a set of full assignment functions that would be modified each time a new discourse referent was encountered, as is done in standard dynamic predicate logic. See Groenendijk and Stokhof (1991).

  21. I am borrowing the notion of an anchoring function from Kamp and Reyle (1993). The anchoring function that I am proposing here, however, is fully incorporated into the semantics of DRSs, unlike the external anchoring function from DRT. See Hunter (2013), Maier (2006, 2009) and Zeevat (1999) for discussion.

  22. See also Kripke (2009) and Soames (1989).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of this issue of Philosophical Studies along with two anonymous reviewers for very useful comments. I would also like to thank the Lichtenberg Kolleg, the participants and organizers of the Content, Context, and Conversation workshop, for which I was able to present an earlier version of this paper, as well as Nicholas Asher, David Beaver, François Recanati, Mark Sainsbury, and Henk Zeevat for useful discussion on the main points of this article.

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    Julie Hunter

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Hunter, J. Structured contexts and anaphoric dependencies. Philos Stud 168, 35–58 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0209-4

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