Formal Pragmatics. Semantics, Pragmatics, Presupposition, and Focus

2005

So-called 'dynamic' semantic theories such as Kamp's discourse representation theory and Heim's file change semantics account for such phenomena as crosssentential anaphora, donkey anaphora, and the novelty condition on indefinites, but compare unfavorably with Montague semantics in some important respects (clarity and simplicity of mathematical foundations, compositionality, handling of quantification and coordination). Preliminary efforts have been made by Muskens and by de Groote to revise and extend Montague semantics to cover dynamic phenomena. We present a new higher-order theory of discourse semantics which improves on their accounts by incorporating a more articulated notion of context inspired by ideas due to David Lewis and to Craige Roberts.

Journal of Semantics, 1993

Structured meanings have evolved as a well-suited tool to describe the semantics of focus constr~ictions (cf. vein Stecl-low 1990; Jacobs 1991; Krifka 1992). In this paper, 1 will show how struct~ired meanings can be combined with a framework ofdynamic interpretation that allows for a cogent expression of anaphoric relations and presuppositions. I will concentrate in particular on the semantics of the hcusing particle only and discuss several phenomena that have gone unnoticed or unsolved so far. for example tlie introduction of discourse markers in the scope of only and alternatives that are anaphorically related to quantifiers. In particular, 1 will show that the proposed representation forniat can handle sentences with multiple occurrences of focusing particles. The paper also includes a discussion of the behavior of negation with respect to presuppositions, and of principles that govern the interpretation of focus on quantified NPs.

1992

The Context Change Potential Model of presuppositions, due to Heim, Kartunnen and Stalnaker, is examined in the light of recent work in dynamic semantics. It is shown that some phenomena concerning the interaction of presupposition and quantification, which had been thought troublesome for the Context Change Model, can be handled without invoking local or intermediate accommodation. A model of global accommodation is developed, and this is applied to a number of pragmatic issues including the strengthening of standard Context Change predictions concerning the projection of presuppositions from conditionals and the licencing of definite descriptions. * I am particularly grateful to

2001

The Studies in Logic, Language and Information is the official book series of the European Association for Logic, Language and Information (FoLLI).

Curr Sociol, 2000

Pragmatics and Cognition 15. 2007. 41-64. Revised and reprinted in: A. Capone, F. Kiefer & F. Lo Piparo, eds, 2016, Indirect Reports and Pragmatics: Interdisciplinary Studies, Dordrecht: Springer, 383-404

This paper is a voice in the ongoing discussion on the source and properties of pragmatic inference that contributes to the representation of discourse meaning. One of the most promising orientations in this debate is truth-conditional pragmatics (TCP, Recanati 2002. TCP recognizes so-called 'top-down' pragmatic processes that contribute to the truth-conditionally evaluable representation of meaning while not being grammatically controlled. It subscribes to contextualism, a standpoint according to which this pragmatic contribution is always present. In other words, utterances are always processed in context and this context affects their interpretation (see . In contextualism, 'there is no level of meaning which is both (i) propositional (truthevaluable) and (ii) minimalist, that is, unaffected by top-down factors'. (Recanati 2004: 90). In this paper, I start off from the contextualist standpoint and develop a proposal of representations of utterance meaning, the so-called merger representations, that incorporate the output of such pragmatic inference. The move from TCP to pragmatics-rich semantics of acts of communication is facilitated by rethinking the compositionality of meaning and predicating compositionality of such pragmatics-rich structures. I argue that the advantage of 'semanticizing' the output of pragmatic sources of meaning is that we can relax the view on compositionality of meaning and offer an algorithm of the interaction of such sources where the requirement of compositionality is imposed on the output of the interaction rather than on the output of the syntactic processing of the sentence. This proposal is applied to belief reports for which it offers representations of their various readings.

2002

This paper addresses the theoretical and descriptive relevance of pragmatic inference with the purpose of exploring the syntax-semantics interface in secondary predication in English. Most standard syntactic analyses proceed on the assumption that there is a uniform, one-to-one correspondence of the postverbal NP (NP 2 henceforth) and the following XP with the semantic interpretation of these phrases as direct object and complement/modifier (or adjunct), respectively. However, upon closer examination of sentences like "I found John gone/out of sight" or "I have a tooth missing", it appears that such an assumption can be challenged on both theoretical and descriptive grounds. Since these pragmatically marked predication structures involve the cancellation of the conventional implicature of the NP 1 V NP 2 string, it is suggested that the syntactic analysis of these instances cannot be established solely on the basis of formal properties alone, but rather needs to be seen in terms of the interaction of the inherent meaning and form properties of the syntactic constituents of the construction with the actual interpretation of these properties by the subject/speaker in a given discourse scenario. At a descriptive level, it is argued that these marked instances of secondary predication can be more aptly analyzed, both syntactically and semantically, as involving complex predicates taking the postverbal NP 2 as their sole object argument.

1999