Dynamic Semantics

It is a somewhat vexed question whether presuppositions are always accommodated into the global context of utterance of the sentence, or whether they may sometimes be accommodated into a local context - the context of some subsentential constituent. Von Fintel (2008) argues that there is no local accommodation. He shows that presuppositions in the scope of universally quantified sentences, which have traditionally been handled via local accommodation (eg Heim 1983), can be accounted for by assuming that conversational participants select a domain of quantification such that every relevant element of it has the property required by the presupposition in the scope. It is shown that this domain selection mechanism cannot account for a related set of data involving presupposition triggers in the restrictor rather than scope of the universal. We also discuss the relationship between quantified sentences and conditionals, and general consequences for the theory of presupposition accommodation.

Contemporary natural-language semantics began with the assumption that the meaning of a sentence could be modeled by a single truth-condition, or by an enti- ty with a truth-condition. But with the recent explosion of dynamic semantics and pragmatics and of work on non-truth-conditional dimensions of linguistic mean- ing, we’re now in the midst of a shift away from a truth-condition-centric view and toward the idea that a sentence’s meaning must be spelled out in terms of its vari- ous roles in conversation. This communicative turn in semantics raises a historical question: why was truth-conditional semantics dominant in the first place, and why were the phenomena now driving the communicative turn initially ignored or misunderstood by truth-conditional semanticists? I offer a historical answer to both questions. The history of natural language semantics—springing from the work of Donald Davidson and Richard Montague—began with a methodological toolkit that Frege, Tarski, Carnap, and others had created to better understand ar- tificial languages. For them, the study of linguistic meaning was subservient to other explanatory goals in logic, philosophy, and the foundations of mathematics, and this subservience was reflected in the fact that they idealized away from all aspects of meaning that get in the way of a one-to-one correspondence between sentences and truth-conditions. The truth-conditional beginnings of natural-lan- guage semantics are best explained by the fact that, upon turning their attention to the empirical study of natural language, Davidson and Montague adopted the methodological toolkit assembled by Frege, Tarski, and Carnap and, along with it, their idealization away from non-truth-conditional semantic phenomena. But this pivot in explanatory priorities toward natural language itself rendered the adop- tion of the truth-conditional idealization inappropriate. Lifting the truth-condi- tional idealization has forced semanticists to upend the conception of linguistic meaning that was originally embodied in their methodology.

This entry focuses on foundational issues in dynamic semantics and static semantics, specifically on what is conceptually at stake between the dynamic framework and the classic, truth-conditional framework, and consequently what kinds of evidence support each framework. The article examines two questions. First, it explores the consequences of taking the proposition as central semantic notion as characteristic of static semantics, and argues that this is not as limiting in accounting for discourse dynamics as many think. Specifically, it explores what it means for a static semantics to incorporate the notion of context change potential in a dynamic pragmatics and denies that this conception of static semantics requires that all updates to the context be eliminative and distributive. Second, it argues that the central difference between the two frameworks is whether semantics or pragmatics accounts for dynamic effects, and explores what this means for the oft-heard claim that dynamic semantics blurs the semantics/pragmatic distinction.

This paper offers a unified semantic explanation of two observations that prove to be problematic for classical analyses of modals, conditionals, and disjunctions: (i) the fact that disjunctions scoping under possibility modals give rise to the free choice effect and (ii) the fact that counterfactuals license simplification of disjunctive antecedents. It shows that the data are well explained by a dynamic semantic analysis of modals and conditionals that uses ideas from the inquisitive semantic tradition in its treatment of disjunction. The analysis explains why embedding a disjunctive possibility under negation reverts disjunction to its classical behavior, is general enough to predict less studied simplification patterns, and also makes progress toward a unified perspective on the distinction between informative, inquisitive, and attentive content.

Donkey sentences have existential and universal readings, but they are not often perceived as ambiguous. We extend the pragmatic theory of nonmaximality in plural definites by Križ (2016) to explain how context disambiguates donkey sentences. We propose that the denotations of such sentences produce truth-value gaps — in certain scenarios the sentences are neither true nor false — and demonstrate that Križ’s pragmatic theory fills these gaps to generate the standard judgments of the literature. Building on Muskens’s (1996) Compositional Discourse Representation Theory and on ideas from supervaluation semantics, the semantic analysis defines a general schema for quantification that delivers the required truth-value gaps. Given the independently motivated pragmatic theory of Križ 2016, we argue that mixed readings of donkey sentences require neither plural information states, contra Brasoveanu 2008, 2010, nor error states, contra Champollion 2016, nor singular donkey pronouns with plural referents, contra Krifka 1996, Yoon 1996. We also show that the pragmatic account improves over alternatives like Kanazawa 1994 that attribute the readings of donkey sentences to the monotonicity properties of the embedding quantifier.

We distinguish three ways that a theory of linguistic meaning and communication might be considered dynamic in character. We provide some examples of systems which are dynamic in some of these senses but not others. We suggest that separating these notions can help to clarify what is at issue in particular debates about dynamic versus static approaches within natural language semantics and pragmatics.

The fact that counterfactuals in general license simplification of disjunctive antecedents is a familiar problem for the traditional Lewis-Stalnaker variably strict analysis of counterfactuals. This paper argues that recent semantic attempts to solve this problem in a variably strict setting do not address related simplification patterns and demonstrates that the data are well explained by a dynamic strict analysis of counterfactuals using ideas from the inquisitive semantic tradition.

According to a popular family of theories, assertions and other communicative acts should be understood as attempts to change the context of a conversation. Contexts, on this view, are publicly shared bodies of information that evolve over the course of a conversation and that play a range of semantic and pragmatic roles. I argue that this view is mistaken: performing a communicative act requires aiming to change the mind of one's addressee, but not necessarily the context. Although changing the context may sometimes be among a speaker's aims, this should be seen as an extra-communicative aim, rather than one that is necessary for the performance of a communicative act. Along the way, I also argue that contexts needn't play a role in linking anaphora to their antecedents. On the view that I defend, theories that take publicly shared contexts to play an essential role in the nature of communicative acts or anaphoric dependence conflate an artifact introduced by idealized models of conversation with a feature of the phenomenon being modeled.

This paper offers a semantically-based solution to the problem of predicting whether a verb will display the subjective conjugation or the objective conjugation in Hungarian. This alternation correlates with the definiteness of the object, but definiteness is not a completely reliable indicator of the subjective/objective alternation, nor is specificity. A prominent view is that the subjective/objective alternation is conditioned by the syntactic category of the object, but this view has also been shown to be untenable. This paper offers a semantic solution: If the referential argument of a phrase is lexically specified as familiar/new, then the phrase bears the feature [+def]/[−def], and this feature governs the conjugations. The notions of novelty and familiarity are made precise using a compositional version of DRT in the context of a suitably large fragment of Hungarian, including local and non-local personal pronouns, demonstratives, definite and indefinite articles, quantifiers, wh-words, numerals, and possessives.

A dynamic semantics for epistemically modalized sentences is an attractive alternative to the orthodox view that our best theory of meaning ascribes to such sentences truth-conditions relative to what is known. I demonstrate that a dynamic story about "might" and "must" offers elegant explanations of a range of puzzling observations about epistemic modals. The first part of the story provides a unifying treatment of disputes about epistemic modality and disputes about matters of fact while at the same time avoiding relativism or an overly weak pragmatics. The second part of the story extends what has been said to cover some further relevant data, including retraction, the interaction between epistemic modality and tense, and embeddings of epistemically modalized sentences under attitude verbs. A comparison between the suggestion made in this article and current versions of the orthodoxy is provided.

The standing tradition in theorizing about meaning, since at least Frege (1892), identifies meaning with propositions, which are, or determine, the truth-conditions of a sentence in a context. But a recent trend has advocated a departure from this tradition: in particular, it has been argued that modal claims do not express standard propositional contents. This non-propositionalism has received different implementations in expressivist semantics (Moss,. They maintain that the key aspect of interpretation of modal claims is the characteristic dynamic effect they have on the context. I argue that pessimism about truth-conditions arises from an overly simplistic picture of content , context and their interaction. While I agree with the critics that an important aspect of modal meaning is the dynamic effect modals have on the context, I argue that they have mischaracterized the nature and the complexity of this effect. A more nuanced account of the interaction between modals and context shows that far from being incompatible with propo-sitional meaning, the dynamic aspect of meaning is precisely what allows us to predict the correct propositional content of an utterance.

Metaethical noncognitivists have trouble arriving at a respectable semantic theory for moral language. The goal of this paper is to make substantial progress toward demonstrating that these problems may be overcome. Replacing the predominant expressivist semantic agenda in metaethics with a dynamic perspective on meaning and communication allows noncognitivists to provide a satisfying analysis of negation and other constructions that have been argued to be problematic for metaethical noncognitivism, including disjunctions. The resulting proposal preserves some of the key insights from recent work on the semantics of expressivism while highlighting the widely neglected early noncognitivists' sympathies to the kind of dynamic story I intend to tell here. A comparison between the advertised dynamic semantic story and current proposals that treat expressivism as a pragmatic rather than semantic theory about moral language is provided.

Several authors have observed that the tools and techniques developed within the field of nonmonotonic logic provide a fruitful framework for the theoretical study of deontic discourse and reasoning. The prominent sources of inspiration for the resulting work in deontic logic are the classical nonmonotonic analyses of reasoning with defeasible generalizations. But while the study of reasoning with defaults may help us understand the nature of prima facie obligations, it arguably does not generalize to address other major sources of nonmonotonicity in deontic discourse and reasoning: the violability of obligations and the sensitivity of obligations to epistemic uncertainty. I demonstrate that the tools and techniques developed within the field of dynamic semantics provide a more comprehensive foundation for deontic logic, the underlying observation being that the semantics of deontic ought is sensitive to the presence or absence of epistemic possibilities in discourse and reasoning. The nonmonotonicity of deontic thought and talk, so the key message of this paper, can be illuminated in terms of the familiar nonmonotonicity of epistemic thought and talk that finds a natural articulation in dynamic semantics.

Focusing on cases which involve binding into epistemic modals with definite descriptions and quantifiers, I raise some new problems for standard approaches to all of these expressions. The difficulties are resolved in a semantic framework that is dynamic in character. I close with a new class of problems about de re readings within the scope of modals.

Von Fintel (Curr Stud Linguist Ser 36:123–152, 2001) and Gillies (Linguist Philos 30(3): 329–360, 2007) have proposed a dynamic strict conditional account of counterfactuals as an alternative to the standard variably strict account due to Stalnaker (Studies in logical theory, Blackwell, London, 1968) and Lewis (Counterfactuals, Blackwell, London, 1973). Von Fintel's view is motivated largely by so-called reverse Sobel sequences, about which the standard view seems to make the wrong predictions. (The other major motivation is data surrounding so-called negative polarity items, which I do not discuss here.) More recently Moss (Noûs 46 (3):561–586, 2012) has offered a pragmatic/epistemic explanation that purports to explain the data without requiring abandonment of the standard view. So far the small amount of subsequent literature has focused primarily on the original class of cases motivating the strict conditional view. What is needed in the debate is an examination of the predictions of the dynamic strict conditional account for a broader range of data. I undertake this task here, presenting a slew of cases that are problematic for the strict conditional view but not for Moss's view, and considering some possible responses. Ultimately I take my contribution to constitute a significant blow to the dynamic strict conditional view, though not a decisive verdict against it.

An examination of conditionals in di¤erent languages leads to a distinction
of three types of conditionals instead of the usual two (indicative and subjunctive).
The three types can be explained by the degree of acceptance or
as-if acceptance of the truth of the antecedent. The labels 'subjunctive' and
'indicative' are shown to be inadequate. So-called indicative conditionals
comprise two classes, the very frequent uncertain-fact conditionals and the
quite rare accepted-fact conditionals. Uncertain-fact conditionals may have
a time shift in contemporary English and the future subjunctive in Portuguese
(though not all of them do). Moreover, paraphrases of 'if' with 'in
case' or 'supposing' are usually possible with approximately the same meaning.
Accepted-fact conditionals never have these features.

Folklore has it that counterfactual Sobel sequences favor a variably strict analysis of conditionals over its plainly strict alternative. Recent discussions of the lore have focussed on the question whether data about reverse counterfactual Sobel sequences actually speak in favor of a dynamic revival of the strict analysis. This paper takes the discussion into a new direction by looking at straight indicative Sobel sequences. The observation is that a variably strict analysis fails to predict the felicity of these sequences given minimal semantic and pragmatic assumptions. A properly elaborated dynamic analysis of indicatives, in contrast, handles the data with grace.

An examination of conditionals in di¤erent languages leads to a distinction of three types of conditionals instead of the usual two (indicative and subjunctive). The three types can be explained by the degree of acceptance or as-if acceptance of the truth of the antecedent. The labels subjunctive and indicative are shown to be inadequate. So-called indicative conditionals comprise two classes, the very frequent uncertain-fact conditionals and the quite rare accepted-fact conditionals. Uncertain-fact conditionals may have a time shift in contemporary English and the future subjunctive in Portuguese (though not all of them do). Moreover, paraphrases of if with in case or supposing are usually possible with approximately the same meaning. Accepted-fact conditionals never have these features.

Kripke (1980) hypothesizes a link between rigidity and scope: a singular term is rigid over a space S of possibilities just in case it is scopeless with respect to modals that quantify over S. Kripke's hypothesis works well when we consider the interaction of singular terms with metaphysical modals, but runs into trouble when we consider the interaction of singular terms with epistemic modals. After describing the trouble in detail, and considering one non-solution to it, I develop a novel version of dynamic semantics that resolves the problem.

Dynamic theories of discourse interpretation seek to describe and explain antecedent- anaphor relations with the help of discourse referents. In a dynamic framework, it is the function of indefinite expressions to introduce new discourse referents, whilst anaphoric expressions serve to retrieve them. Dynamic theories provide a simple and intuitively appealing solution to a variety of problems. For instance, they explain how it is possible for an indefinite expression to bind a pronoun that isn’t c-commanded by it, and they impose accessibility constraints on the interpretation of pronouns that, by large, seem to be adequate. However, it has been known for a long time that dynamic theories encounter problems with what I call “piggyback anaphora”: anaphoric links that are enabled by the fact that the anaphoric expression sits in the scope of an expression that quantifies over the same range of entities as the expression whose scope contains the intended antecedent. I argue that the key to solving this problem lies in the fact that this type of anaphora involves a form of bridging.

This is my Candidate of Sciences (PhD equivalent) dissertation, defended on June 26, 2017. It is put here as is, with numerous mishaps, partly pointed out by the reviewers, with only a dedication added anew.
I also attach a slightly corrected version of the short presentation prepared for the defense in collaboration with the thesis supervisor, Prof. Ivan Mikirtumov. The presentation is significantly biased towards logical wording, even where linguistic terminology would be more appropriate.
Moreover, another presentation is added, which is the initial version where one can find more elaborate comments on what actually is going on in my paper.

In this paper I argue that the principle of compositionality should be thought of as a principle that applies to the live meanings of constituent expressions. Under such a conception of the principle contextualist findings in the philosophy of language can be handled in an intuitive and non-trivial way. Several cases, most of them known from the semantics literature, are addressed in order to illustrate the presence of live meanings. The live principle also grounds a so-called interference principle, that is used as a methodological tool for a fair judgement of proposed semantic explanations of various intricate linguistic phenomena.

This paper argues for a new notion of domain presupposition and proposes a novel general account of presuppositions in terms of a condition of pre-identification, relating the presupposition either to the local discourse context or else the actual index of evaluation. This account has various advantages over standard dynamic semantic theories, including that of being applicable to domain presuppositions.

Von Fintel (Curr Stud Linguist Ser 36:123–152, 2001) and Gillies (Linguist Philos 30(3): 329–360, 2007) have proposed a dynamic strict conditional account of counterfactuals as an alternative to the standard variably strict account due to Stalnaker (Studies in logical theory, Blackwell, London, 1968) and Lewis (Counterfactuals, Blackwell, London, 1973). Von Fintel's view is motivated largely by so-called reverse Sobel sequences, about which the standard view seems to make the wrong predictions. (The other major motivation is data surrounding so-called negative polarity items, which I do not discuss here.) More recently Moss (Noûs 46 (3):561–586, 2012) has offered a pragmatic/epistemic explanation that purports to explain the data without requiring abandonment of the standard view. So far the small amount of subsequent literature has focused primarily on the original class of cases motivating the strict conditional view. What is needed in the debate is an examination of the predi...

There is a longstanding debate in the literature about static versus dynamic approaches to meaning and conversation. A formal result due to van Benthem (1986, 1996) is often thought to be important for understanding what, conceptually speaking, is at issue in the debate. We introduce the concept of a conversation system, and we use it to clarify the import of van Benthem's result. We then distinguish two classes of conversation systems, corresponding to two concepts of staticness. The first class corresponds to a generalization of the class of systems that van Benthem's result concerns. These are the strongly static conversation systems. The second class is broader, and allows for a certain commonly recognized form of context sensitivity. These are the weakly static conversation systems. In the vein of van Benthem's result, we supply representation theorems which independently characterize these two varieties of conversation system. We observe that some canonically dynamic semantic systems correspond to weakly static conversation systems. We close by discussing some hazards that arise in trying to bring our formal results to bear on natural language phenomena, and on the debate about whether the compositional semantics for natural language should take a dynamic shape.

1 See e.g. for sluicing and Sag (1976) for VPE. More recently, the 'silent structure' approach has been the subject of criticism from several quarters (Culicover and Jackendoff 2005, Jacobson 2013 a.o.). We do not attempt to address these criticisms here.

One of the central topics in semantic theory over the last few decades concerns the nature of local contexts. Recently, theorists have tried to develop general, non-stipulative accounts of local contexts (Schlenker, 2009; Ingason, 2016; Mandelkern & Romoli, 2017a). In this paper, we contribute to this literature by drawing attention to the local contexts of subclausal expressions. More specifically, we focus on the local contexts of quantificational determiners, e.g. `all', `both', etc. Our central tool for probing the local contexts of subclausal elements is the principle Maximize Presupposition! (Percus, 2006; Singh, 2011). The empirical basis of our investigation concerns some data discussed by Anvari (2018b), e.g. the fact that sentences such as `All of the two presidential candidates are crooked' are unacceptable. In order to explain this, we suggest that the local context of determiners needs to contain the information carried by their restrictor. However, no existing non-stipulative account predicts this. Consequently, we think that the local contexts of subclausal expressions will likely have to be stipulated. This result has important consequences for debates in semantics and pragmatics, e.g. those around the so-called "explanatory problem" for dynamic semantics (Soames, 1982; Heim, 1990; Schlenker, 2009).

This squib studies the order in which elements are added to the shared context of interlocutors in a conversation. It focuses on context updates within one hierarchical structure and argues that structurally higher elements are entered into the context before lower elements, even if the structurally higher elements are pronounced after the lower elements. The crucial data are drawn from a comparison of relative clauses in two head-initial languages, English and Icelandic, and two head-final languages, Korean and Japanese. The findings have consequences for any theory of a dynamic semantics.

I show that standard dynamic approaches to the semantics of epistemic modals invalidate the classical laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction, as well as the law of 'epistemic non-contradiction'. I argue that these heretofore unnoticed facts pose a serious challenge for these approaches.

Recently, a number of theorists , Egan , Stephenson (2007a,b)) have argued that an adequate semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals calls for some technical notion of relativist truth and/or relativist content. Much of this work has relied on an empirical thesis about speaker judgments, namely that competent speakers tend to judge a present-tense bare epistemic possibility claim true only if the prejacent is compatible with their information. Relativists have in particular appealed to judgments elicited in so-called eavesdropping and retraction cases to support this empirical thesis. But opposing theorists have denied the judgments, and at present there is no consensus in the literature about how the speaker judgments in fact pattern. Consequently there is little agreement on what exactly a semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals should predict about the pattern of judgments in these cases. Further theorizing requires greater clarity on the data to be explained. To clarify the data, we subjected eavesdropping and retraction cases to experimental evaluation. Our data provide evidence against the claim that competent speakers tend to judge a present-tense bare epistemic possibility claim true only if the prejacent is compatible with their information. Theories designed to predict this result are accordingly undermined.

The aim of this paper is to introduce a certain kind of information state representation in a dynamic system of propositional logic, using finite state automatons and highlight its advantages, including relation to inquisitive semantics and belief revision.

We investigate a basic probabilistic dynamic semantics for a fragment containing conditionals, probability operators, modals, and attitude verbs, with the aim of shedding light on the prospects for adding probabilistic structure to models of the conversational common ground.

This paper develops a type of dynamic semantics in which contexts include not only information, but also questions, whose answers are ranked by strength. The questions can be local to the restrictor of a quantifier, and the quantifier can bind into them. The proposed framework satisfies several desiderata arising from quantificational expressions involving exclusives (e.g. only, just, mere, and sole), allowing: (i) presupposed questions; (ii) presuppositional constraints on the strength ranking over the answers to the question under discussion; (iii) quantificational binding into such presupposed questions; and (iv) compositional derivation of logical forms for sentences.