This paper revisits some foundational questions concerning the abstract representation of a discourse context. The context of a conversation is represented by a body of information that is presumed to be shared by the participants in the conversation – the information that the speaker presupposes a point at which a speech act is interpreted. This notion is designed to represent both the information on which context-dependent speech acts depend, and the situation that speech acts are designed to affect, and so (...) to be a representation of context that is appropriate for explaining the interaction of context and the contents expressed in them. After reviewing the motivating ideas and the outlines of the apparatus, the paper responds to a criticism of the framework, and considers the way it can help to clarify some phenomena concerning pronouns with indefinite antecedents. (shrink)

In Situations and Individuals, Paul Elbourne argues that the natural language expressions that have been taken to refer to individuals — pronouns, proper names, and definite descriptions — have a common syntax and semantics, roughly that of definite descriptions as construed in the tradition of Frege. In the course of his argument, Elbourne shows that proper names have previously undetected donkey anaphoric readings.This is contrary to previous theorizing and, if true, would undermine what philosophers call the direct reference theory (which (...) holds that the sole contribution of a proper name to the truth conditions of a sentence is an individual) as well as the related doctrine that proper names are rigid designators. Elbourne begins by addressing donkey anaphora, relating other concerns about pronouns to the solution of this notorious problem. His subsequent argumentation provides a unified semantics for the donkey anaphoric and bound and referential uses of pronouns and discusses the prospect of unifying the syntax and semantics of pronouns with the syntax and semantics of normal definite descriptions. Elbourne's aim is not only to advance his proposal of a unified syntax and semantics but also to urge linguists and philosophers dealing with pronoun interpretation to consider a wider range of theories than they do at present, and to test the competing claims of description-based theories and dynamic semantics against the data. (shrink)

The Strongest Meaning Hypothesis of Dalrymple et al (1994,1998), which was originally proposed as a principle for the interpretation of reciprocals, is extended in this paper into a general principle of plural predication. This principle applies to complex predicates that are composed of lexical predicates that hold of atomic entities, and determines the pluralities in the extension of the predicate. The meaning of such a complex predicate is claimed to be the truth-conditionally strongest meaning that does not contradict lexical properties (...) of the simple predicates it contains. Weak interpretations of reciprocals (as in the books are stacked on top of each other), plural predicate conjunction (e.g. the books are old and new) and ’atomic’ distributivity in general are derived by a unified mechanism, which ’weakens’ the basic universal meanings of strong reciprocals, boolean conjunction and quantification over atomic entities. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that anaphoric pronouns should always be interpreted exhaustively. I propose that pronouns are either used referentially and refer to the speaker's referents of their antecedent indefinites, or descriptively and go proxy for the description recoverable from its antecedent clause. I show how this view can be implemented within a dynamic semantics, and how it can account for various examples that seemed to be problematic for the view that for all unbound pronouns there always should be (...) a notion of exhaustivity/uniqueness involved. The uniqueness assumption for the use of singular pronouns is also shown to be importantto explain what the discourse referents used in dynamic semantics represent. (shrink)

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of the space of possible analyses of the phenomenon of quantifier domain restriction, together with a set of considerations which militate against all but our own proposal. Among the many accounts we consider and reject are the ‘explicit’ approach to quantifier domain restric‐tion discussed, for example, by Stephen Neale, and the pragmatic approach to quantifier domain restriction proposed by Kent Bach. Our hope is that the exhaustive discussion of this special case of (...) context‐dependence will provide guidelines for how to decide, for an arbitrary case of context‐dependent discourse, whether it should be treated syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy's (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof's (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

This article brings together two independent lines of research on numerally quantified expressions, e.g. two girls. One stems from work in linguistic theory and asks what truth conditional contributions such expressions make to the utterances in which they are used--in other words, what do numerals mean? The other comes from the study of language development and asks when and how children learn the meaning of such expressions. My goal is to show that when integrated, these two perspectives can both constrain (...) and enrich each other in ways hitherto not considered. Specifically, work in linguistic theory suggests that in addition to their 'exactly n' interpretation, numerally quantified NPs such as two hoops can also receive an 'at least n' and an 'at most n' interpretation, e.g. you need to put two hoops on the pole to win (i.e. at least two hoops) and you can miss two shots and still win (i.e. at most two shots). I demonstrate here through the results of three sets of experiments that by the age of 5 children have implicit knowledge of the fact that expressions like two N can be interpreted as 'at least two N' and 'at most two N' while they do not yet know the meaning of corresponding expressions such as at least/most two N which convey these senses explicitly. I show that these results have important implications for theories of the semantics of numerals and that they raise new questions for developmental accounts of the number vocabulary. (shrink)

Preface This book is about semantics and logic. More specifically, it is about the semantics and logic of natural language; and, even more specifically than ...

This paper is devoted to the formulation and investigation of a dynamic semantic interpretation of the language of first-order predicate logic. The resulting system, which will be referred to as ‘dynamic predicate logic’, is intended as a first step towards a compositional, non-representational theory of discourse semantics. In the last decade, various theories of discourse semantics have emerged within the paradigm of model-theoretic semantics. A common feature of these theories is a tendency to do away with the principle of compositionality, (...) a principle which, implicitly or explicitly, has dominated semantics since the days of Frege. Therefore the question naturally arises whether non-compositionality is in any way a necessary feature of discourse semantics. Since we subscribe to the interpretation of compositionality as constituting primarily a methodological principle, we consider this to be a methodological rather than an empirical question. As a consequence, the emphasis in the present paper lies on developing an alternative compositional semantics of discourse, which is empirically equivalent to its non-compositional brethren, but which differs from them in a principled methodological way. Hence, no attempts are made to improve on existing theories empirically. Nevertheless, as we indicate in section 5, the development of a compositional alternative may in the end have empirical consequences, too. First of all, it can be argued that the dynamic view on interpretation developed in this paper suggests natural and relatively easy to formulate extensions which enable one to deal with a wider range of phenomena than can be dealt with in existing theories. Moreover, the various approaches to the model-theoretic semantics of discourse that have been developed during the last decade, have constituted a ‘fresh start’ in the sense that much of what had been accomplished before was ignored, at least for a start. Of course, this is a justified strategy if one feels one is trying to develop a radically different approach to recalcitrant problems. However, there comes a time when such new approaches have to be compared with the older one, and when an assessment of the pros and cons of each has to be made. One of the main problems in semantics today, we feel, is that a semantic theory such as Montague grammar, and an approach like Kamp’s discourse representation theory, are hard to compare, let alone that it is possible to unify their insights and results.. (shrink)

In The Dynamics of Meaning , Gennaro Chierchia tackles central issues in dynamic semantics and extends the general framework. Chapter 1 introduces the notion of dynamic semantics and discusses in detail the phenomena that have been used to motivate it, such as "donkey" sentences and adverbs of quantification. The second chapter explores in greater depth the interpretation of indefinites and issues related to presuppositions of uniqueness and the "E-type strategy." In Chapter 3, Chierchia extends the dynamic approach to the domain (...) of syntactic theory, considering a range of empirical problems that includes backwards anaphora, reconstruction effects, and weak crossover. The final chapter develops the formal system of dynamic semantics to deal with central issues of definites and presupposition. Chierchia shows that an approach based on a principled enrichment of the mechanisms dealing with meaning is to be preferred on empirical grounds over approaches that depend on an enrichment of the syntactic apparatus. Dynamics of Meaning illustrates how seemingly abstract stances on the nature of meaning can have significant and far-reaching linguistic consequences, leading to the detection of new facts and influencing our understanding of the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface. (shrink)

Negative polarity is one of the more elusive aspects of linguistics and a subject which has been gaining in importance in recent years. Written from within the well-defined theoretical framework of Generalized Quantifiers, the three main areas considered in this study are collocations, polarity items and multiple negations. In this mature piece of research, van der Wouden takes into account, not only semantic and syntactic considerations, but also to a large extent, pragmatic ones illustrating a wide array of linguistic approaches.

In this volume, Geurts takes discourse representation theory (DRT), and turns it into a unified account of anaphora and presupposition, which he applies not only to the standard problem cases but also to the interpretation of modal expressions, attitude reports, and proper names. The resulting theory, for all its simplicity, is without doubt the most comprehensive of its kind to date. The central idea underlying Geurts' 'binding theory' of presupposition is that anaphora is just a special case of presupposition projection. (...) But this is only one of the ways in which the concept of presupposition is taken beyond its traditional limits. Geurts shows, furthermore, that presupposition projection is crucially involved in several phenomena that are not usually viewed in presuppositional terms, such as modal subordination, de re readings of attitude reports, and rigid designation. While making his case for DRT and the binding theory, Geurts also presents an incisive analysis of what is probably still the most influential account of presupposition, viz. the satisfaction theory, demonstrating that there are fundamental problems not only with this theory but with the very framework in which it is couched. (shrink)

Precursors. 2.1 Introduction Thus far I have presented an approach to the semantics of plurals in the form of two rather similar grammars for a fragment of English. And I have given a few examples of the kinds of things one can say within this ...

This book offers a unique synthesis of past and current work on the structure, meaning, and use of negation and negative expressions, a topic that has engaged thinkers from Aristotle and the Buddha to Freud and Chomsky. Horn's masterful study melds a review of scholarship in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics with original research, providing a full picture of negation in natural language and thought; this new edition adds a comprehensive preface and bibliography, surveying research since the book's original publication.

Following his recently expanded _The Problem of the Essential Indexical and Other Essays,_ John Perry develops a reflexive-referential' account of indexicals, demonstratives and proper names. On these issues the philosophy of language in the twentieth century was shaped by two competing traditions, descriptivist and referentialist. Oddly, the classic referentialist texts of the 1970s by Kripke, Donnellan, Kaplan and others were seemingly refuted almost a century earlier by co-reference and no-reference problems raised by Russell and Frege. Perry's theory, borrowing ideas from (...) both traditions as well as from Burks and Reichenbach, diagnoses the problems as stemming from a fixation on a certain kind of content, coined referential or fully incremental. Referentialist tradition is portrayed as holding that indexicals contribute content that involves individuals without identifying conditions on them; descriptivist tradition is portrayed as holding that referential content does not explain all of the identifying conditions conveyed by names and indexicals. Perry reveals a coherent and structured family of contents — from reflexive contents that place conditions on their actual utterance to fully incremental contents that place conditions only on the objects of reference — reconciling the legitimate insights of both traditions. (shrink)

This revised edition includes a new Preface outlining developments in Relevance Theory since 1986, discussing the more serious criticisms of the theory, and ...

When we speak, we mean more than we say. In this book Stephen C. Levinson explains some general processes that underlie presumptions in communication.

Much recent research on child language has been inspired by linguistic principles uncovered by linguists working in the generative framework. Developmental psycholinguists have demonstrated young children’s mastery of a variety of linguistic principles; mostly syntactic principles, but also some semantic principles. The present paper contributes to research on the acquisition of semantics by presenting the findings of a new experiment designed to investigate young children’s knowledge of downward entailment, which is a basic semantic property of Universal Grammar. Section 2 describes (...) how downward entailing operators work in natural languages. Section 3 addresses the issue of how a child could master the complex behavior displayed by downward entailing operators across natural languages. That section also reviews the findings of previous research on children’s knowledge of downward entailment. Section 4 presents the new experiment which was designed to investigate whether children’s knowledge of downward entailment extends to one of its logical properties, as illustrated by one of De Morgan’s laws. Section 5 offers some brief remarks on future research. (shrink)

A downward-entailing context has the property that the replacement of the predicate in the context by a stronger predicate preserves truth. So, for instance, presuppositions aside, the context after “every” in (1) where the NPI “ever” appears is downward entailing.

The paper investigates the scope properties of indefinites.

The idea is that, in a wide range of contexts, utterances of the sentences in (a) in each case will communicate the assumption in (b) in each case (or something closely akin to it, there being a certain amount of contextually governed variation in the speaker's propositional attitude and so the scope of the negation). These scalar inferences are taken to be one kind of (generalized) conversational implicature. As is the case with pragmatic inference quite generally, these inferences are defeasible (...) (cancellable), which distinguishes them from entailments, and they are nondetachable, which distinguishes them from conventional implicatures. The core idea is that the choice of a weaker element from a scale of elements ordered in terms of semantic strength (that is, numbers of entailments) tends to implicate that, as far as the speaker knows, none of the stronger elements in the scale holds in this instance. The pattern is quite clear in (1) and (2), where the weak/strong alternatives are some/all and five/six respectively. In the case of (3), the stronger expression must be intelligent and good-hearted which entails intelligent; what Y's utterance implicates is that Mary does not have the two properties: intelligence and good-heartedness, so that, given the proposition expressed (Mary is intelligent) it follows, deductively, that she is not good-hearted, in Y's opinion. The example in (4) involves a scale inversion due to the negation, so that the weak/strong alternatives are not necessarily/not possibly; the negation which the scalar inference generates creates a double negation, which is eliminated giving possibly. (shrink)

In this paper, I review a number of arguments in favor of treating many of the central cases of presupposition as the result of conversational inference, rather than as lexically specified properties of particular expressions. I then argue that, despite the standard assumption to the contrary, the view of presupposition as constraints on the common ground is not consistent with the provision of a conversational account of particular presuppositional constraints. The argument revolves crucially around the workings of accommodation. I then (...) offer an alternative view of the phenomenon of presupposition, which is compatible with a variety of sources for presuppositions. On the view offered here, presupposition is seen as a property of utterances. I argue that the presuppositions of an utterance are those propositions which an interpreter must take the speaker to accept in order to take the speaker to be fully cooperative, in the Gricean sense. (shrink)

Much recent research on child language has been inspired by linguistic principles uncovered by linguists working in the generative framework. Developmental psycholinguists have demonstrated young children’s mastery of a variety of linguistic principles; mostly syntactic principles, but also some semantic principles. The present paper contributes to research on the acquisition of semantics by presenting the findings of a new experiment designed to investigate young children’s knowledge of downward entailment, which is a basic semantic property of Universal Grammar. Section 2 describes (...) how downward entailing operators work in natural languages. Section 3 addresses the issue of how a child could master the complex behavior displayed by downward entailing operators across natural languages. That section also reviews the findings of previous research on children’s knowledge of downward entailment. Section 4 presents the new experiment which was designed to investigate whether children’s knowledge of downward entailment extends to one of its logical properties, as illustrated by one of De Morgan’s laws. Section 5 offers some brief remarks on future research. (shrink)