This book combines insights from philosophy and linguistics to develop a novel framework for theorizing about linguistic meaning and the role of context in interpretation. A key innovation is to introduce explicit representations of context — assignment variables — in the syntax and semantics of natural language. The proposed theory systematizes a spectrum of “shifting” phenomena in which the context relevant for interpreting certain expressions depends on features of the linguistic environment. Central applications include local and nonlocal contextual dependencies with (...) quantifiers, attitude ascriptions, conditionals, questions, and relativization. The result is an innovative, philosophically informed compositional semantics compatible with the truth-conditional paradigm. (shrink)

The paper addresses foundational questions concerning the dynamic semantics of natural language based on dynamic logic of the Groenendijko-Stokhofian kind. Discussing a series of model calculi of increasing complexity, it shows in detail how the usual semantics of dynamic logic can be seen as emerging from the account for certain inferential patterns of natural language, namely those governing anaphora. In this way, the current ‘dynamic turn’ of logic is argued to be reasonably seen not as the product of changing the (...) focus of logic from the relation of entailment to „a structure of human cognitive action“ (van Benthem), but rather as merely another step in our long-term effort to master more and more inferential patterns. (shrink)