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Lecture 6. Dynamic Semantics, Presuppositions, and Context Change, II

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Lecture 6. Dynamic Semantics, Presuppositions, and Context Change, II Formal Semantics and Formal Pragmatics, Lecture 6 Formal Semantics and Formal Pragmatics, Lecture 6 Barbara H. Partee, MGU, April 10, 2009 p. 1 Barbara H. Partee, MGU, April 10, 2009 p. 2 Lecture 6. Dynamic Semantics, Presuppositions, and Context Change, II. DR (1) (incomplete) 1.! Kamp’s Discourse Representation Theory............................................................................................................ 1! u v 2.! File Change Semantics and the Anaphoric Theory of Definiteness: Heim Chapter III ........................................ 5! ! ! 2.1. Informative discourse and file-keeping. ........................................................................................................... 6! 2.2. Novelty and Familiarity..................................................................................................................................... 9! Pedro owns a donkey 2.3. Truth ................................................................................................................................................................ 10! u = Pedro 2.4. Conclusion: Motivation for the File Change Model of Semantics.................................................................. 10! u owns a donkey 3. Presuppositions and their parallels to anaphora ..................................................................................................... 11! donkey (v) 3.1. Background on presuppositions ...................................................................................................................... 11! u owns v 3.2. The projection problem for presuppositions.................................................................................................... 11! 3.3. Anaphoric properties of presuppositions and other context-dependent phenomena....................................... 12! 4. Dynamic semantics................................................................................................................................................. 13! In general, each occurrence of a proper name or an indefinite NP leas to the introduction of a Appendix: Comparing Heim’s Ch. II and Ch. III theories......................................................................................... 13! References ................................................................................................................................................................... 14! new “discourse referent” or “discourse entity” in the DR. By contrast, pronouns must be interpreted as referring to discourse entities already contained in the DR. (Deictic uses of Readings: Full references and links are in References at the end. These are all on the CD. pronouns are assimilated to this treatment by allowing for accommodation of discourse referents (1) (Heim 1983a) On the projection problem for presuppositions. that come from the context into a DR. We’ll return to Kamp’s and Heim’s treatment of deictics (2) (Kamp 1981) A theory of truth and semantic representation. and demonstratives when we discuss that topic in a later lecture.) Optional readings: The complete DR for (1) is then the following (Kamp 1981, p.287): (3) (Heim 1982) Heim dissertation, Chapter 3. (4) (Heim 1983b) File change semantics and the familiarity theory of definiteness. DR (1) (complete, showing intermediate steps) (5) (Stalnaker 1978) Assertion. u v (6) (van der Sandt 1992) Presupposition projection as anaphora resolution. ! ! Pedro owns a donkey 1. Kamp’s Discourse Representation Theory. u = Pedro u owns a donkey In this section, drawn largely from (Partee 1984), I’ll sketch the key features of Hans Kamp’s donkey (v) Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) (Kamp 1981). Kamp’s theory shares many features u owns v with Heim’s, and has continued to be developed and applied to many domains in linguistics and He beats it computational linguistics since its introduction (Kamp and Reyle 1993, Kamp and u beats it Rossdeutscher 1994, Rohrer et al. 2001). u beats v Kamp’s approach makes crucial use of an intermediate level of representation, “Discourse Representation Structures”, mediating between syntax and model-theoretic interpretation. A DR This DR is equivalent to one in which we omit intermediate steps. can be thought of as a description of a partial model. A simple DR counts as true with respect to a complete model if it is embeddable into the model; embeddability is a technical notion in DR (1) (complete, omitting intermediate steps) Kamp’s system which plays a role analogous to satisfaction conditions in a standard semantics for predicate logic. (I won’t give the full definition, but I’ll illustrate it below.) In more complex u v cases, the DRS consists of a structured set of DR’s, and the embeddability conditions for the ! ! entire DRS are recursively defined in terms of embeddability of substructures. When we look at u = Pedro Heim’s File Change Semantics, we’ll see analogous rules for the truth-conditions of a file donkey (v) relative to a model and a context. u owns v u beats v A discourse is simply a finite sequence of sentences. The fragment treated in (Kamp 1981) includes simple sentences similar to those in our first fragment, plus if-then sentences, including “donkey sentences.” The simplest cases are those discourses in which none of the sentences The discourse (1) will be true in a model M with respect to DR(1) just in case there is a way of contains if-then or every and all the NPs are either proper names of indefinite NPs. As an embedding DR(1) into M, i.e. a mapping of u and v onto individuals in M such that all of the example we give the DR of the two-sentence discourse in (1): conditions in DR(1) are satisfied. (1) Pedro owns a donkey. He beats it. Note that the existential quantifier in the embeddability conditions has the effect of giving the discourse entity v corresponding to a donkey an existentially quantified interpretation, with The first sentence of (1) leads to the following DR (Kamp, 1981, p.287), constructed by scope extending over the whole discourse. (Heim’s File Change Semantics does the same thing; processing it top-down according to syntax-driven construction rules: and her Chapter 2 theory inserted an unselective " at the Text node.) Thus the truth conditions MGU096.doc 1 MGU096.doc 2 Formal Semantics and Formal Pragmatics, Lecture 6 Formal Semantics and Formal Pragmatics, Lecture 6 Barbara H. Partee, MGU, April 10, 2009 p. 3 Barbara H. Partee, MGU, April 10, 2009 p. 4 assigned to (1) in Kamp’s system are the same as those for the first-order sentence (1’), or DR1(2) DR2(2) equivalently (1’’). (3) v (1’) "u"v(u = p & donkey(v) & own(u, v) & beat (u,v)) ! (1) he beats it (1’’) "v(donkey(v) & own(p, v) & beat (p,v)) (1) Pedro owns a donkey (4) u beats it (2) u owns a donkey (5) u beats v An indefinite NP introduces what amounts to a free variable, which doesn’t get formally bound, (3) donkey (v) but gets implicitly bound in the passage from DRS to truth-conditions via embeddability; this is (3) u owns v part of what allows Kamp (and likewise Heim) to provide a unified treatment of pronouns with definite and indefinite antecedents. All pronouns are treated identically at the DRS level: any In steps 4 and 5, we are able to assign the entities u and v to the pronouns because DR2 is pronoun may be equated at the appropriate construction step with any discourse entity accessible subordinate to both DR1 and DR0. to it in the DRS; we discuss accessibility below. The embeddability conditions for DRS’s resulting from the if-then rule is roughly as follows: Universal quantifiers and conditional sentences give rise to more complex DRSs with special DRS(2) is embeddable in M if there is a mapping which satisfies the atomic conditions in DR0, embedding conditions which are relevant to bound-variable anaphora (Partee 1978) and the (i.e. which assigns u to Pedro) such that every extension of it which satisfies DR1 also satisfies treatment of donkey-sentences. We illustrate first with the conditonal sentence (2). DR2 . (2) If Pedro owns a donkey, he beats it. The rules for constructing DRS’s for sentences with an every-NP are very similar; we illustrate with sentence (3) and its DRS. Step 1. (3) Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it. DR0 (2) DRS (3) DR (3) (0) If Pedro owns a donkey, he beats it 0 (0) Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it. Step 2 (see detailed discussion in (Partee 1984).) The arrows indicate a stipulated “subordination relation”, which determines accessibility for anaphora (and for presupposition satisfaction). I’ll DR (3) DR (3) add numbers to annotate the steps. 1 2 (1) x (2) v DRS (2) (incomplete) ! ! (1) x beats it (1) farmer (x) (3) x beats v (1) x owns a donkey (0) If Pedro owns a donkey, he beats it (2) donkey (v) (2) x owns v The embeddability condition for every-constructions is the same as that for if-then sentences. (1) Pedro owns a donkey (1) he beats it We can refer to such DRS configurations as universal/conditional structures. Note that while the construction of DRS’s is determined (up to the choice of antecedents for Then each of the two embedded DRs is processed in the usual way, antecedent first, with the pronouns) by the syntactic rules, syntactically similar sentences or discourses may receive quite proviso that a discourse entity corresponding to a proper noun, together with its identity different DRS’s, particularly because of the difference between the rule for every and the rule for condition, is placed in the top DR of the DRS (making it available for anaphora anywhere
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