Dynamic Semantics

Proceedings of the 11-th Annual Conference …, 1996

Whether, and if so in what sense, dynamic semantics establishes the need to move away from standard truth-conditional semantics, is a question that has been discussed in the literature on and off. This paper does not attempt to answer it, it merely wants to draw attention to an aspect that has hitherto received little attention in the discussion, viz., the question what role we assign to the use of formal systems in doing natural language semantics. * ILLC/Department of Philosophy, Universiteit van Amsterdam. I would like to thank Johan van Benthem and the editors for their comments and their patience. 

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.

1993

2001

In ordinary talk, we presuppose a great deal. That is, we take things for granted, assuming that the other conversational participants share our knowledge of them. This book is about linguistic presupposition, how what we take for granted is reflected in what we say. In the book I first explore what around a hundred previous researchers have had to say about presupposition, and then make my own contribution. That contribution is set within the framework of dynamic semantics, an approach to meaning that has been developed ...

Final version available in Intercultural Pragmatics 21(3): 379-402, 2024

"Natural languages are programming languages for minds." Can we or should we take this slogan seriously? If so, how? Can answers be found by looking at the various "dynamic" treatments of natural language developed over the last decade or so, mostly in response to problems associated with donkey anaphora? In Dynamic Logic of Programs, the meaning of a program is a binary relation on the set of states of some abstract machine. This relation is meant to model aspects of the effects of the execution of the program, in particular its input-output behavior. What, if anything, are the dynamic aspects of various proposed dynamic semantics for natural languages supposed to model? Is there anything dynamic to be modeled? If not, what is all the full about? We shall try to answer some, at least, of these questions and provide materials for answers to others.

The fields of semantics and pragmatics are devoted to the study of conventionalized and context- or use-dependent aspects of natural language meaning, respectively. The complexity of human language as a semiotic system has led to considerable debate about how the semantics/pragmatics distinction should be drawn, if at all. This debate largely reflects contrasting views of meaning as a property of linguistic expressions versus something that speakers do. The fact that both views of meaning are essential to a complete understanding of language has led to a variety of efforts over the last 40 years to develop better integrated and more comprehensive theories of language use and interpretation. The most important advances have included the adaptation of propositional analyses of declarative sentences to interrogative, imperative and exclamative forms; the emergence of dynamic, game theoretic, and multi-dimensional theories of meaning; and the development of various techniques for incorporating context-dependent aspects of content into representations of context-invariant content with the goal of handling phenomena such as vagueness resolution, metaphor, and metonymy. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:285–297. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1227For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.Conflict of interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.