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Dynamic Semantics Dynamic Semantics Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy Volume 91 Managing Editors Lisa Matthewson, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Yael Sharvit, University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA Thomas Ede Zimmermann, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany Editorial Board Johan van Benthem, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands Gregory N. Carlson, University of Rochester, USA David Dowty, Ohio State University, Columbus, USA Gerald Gazdar, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Irene Heim, M.I.T., Cambridge, USA Ewan Klein, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK Bill Ladusaw, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA Terrence Parsons, University of California, Irvine, USA For furthervolumes: http://www.springer.com/series/6556 Dynamic Semantics Paul J. E. Dekker 123 PaulJ. E.Dekker Department of Philosophy Universityof Amsterdam OudeTurfmarkt 145 1012GC Amsterdam The Netherlands ISSN 0924-4662 ISBN 978-94-007-4868-2 ISBN 978-94-007-4869-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-4869-9 SpringerDordrechtHeidelbergNewYorkLondon LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2012940234 (cid:2)SpringerScience+BusinessMediaDordrecht2012 Thisworkissubjecttocopyright.AllrightsarereservedbythePublisher,whetherthewholeorpartof the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation,broadcasting,reproductiononmicrofilmsorinanyotherphysicalway,andtransmissionor informationstorageandretrieval,electronicadaptation,computersoftware,orbysimilarordissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifically for the purposeofbeingenteredandexecutedonacomputersystem,forexclusiveusebythepurchaserofthe work. 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Printedonacid-freepaper SpringerispartofSpringerScience+BusinessMedia(www.springer.com) Acknowledgments I thank my tutors Maria Aloni, Jeroen Groenendijk, Herman Hendriks, Theo M.V. Janssen Martin Stokhof, and Frank Veltman for the right kind of philo- sophical-logical education leading me to write this monograph. This monograph can be considered a kind of compilation of their ideas, even though, of course, noneofthemcanbeblamedforanythingIclaim.Myintellectualtraininghasalso greatly benefited from both the persons, and the works, of Alastair Butler, David Israel,PaulineJacobson,HansKamp,FriederikeMoltmann,BarbaraPartee,Anna Szabolcsi, Henk Zeevat, and Ede Zimmermann. Thanks to all of them! Special thanksarealsoduetoEricFlaten,whokindlyagreedtocorrecttypographicaland stylistic infelicities in this monograph, and in so doing also helped me to correct errors of myself. v Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 Predicate Logic with Anaphora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3 Information Update and Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 4 Quantification and Modality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 5 Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 vii Chapter 1 Introduction Whatliesinfrontofyou,thereader,isamonographappropriatelycalled‘Dynamic Semantics’.Afterreadingit,itwill,Ihope,becleartoyouwhyitiscalledso,but beforereadingitthetitlemayneedsomeclarification.Amostobviousinterpretation oftheterm“DynamicSemantics”maybethatitisconcernedwithadynamicstyle ofsemanticlinguistictheorizing.Ifonewouldthinkofthismonographasexhibiting suchatypeoflinguistictheorizingIwouldbeverymuchflattered,butIdon’tthink Icouldagreewiththequalification,really.Themonographisdull,andintendedto bedull.Alesslikely,butequallyinappropriate,interpretationofthetitlewouldbe that this monograph is concerned with a semantic theory of dynamic objects, like actions,processes,arrowsandpopstars.Thismonograph,andthesubjectsitcovers, aredefinitelynotaboutthat,eventhougharrowsandpopstars,likestamps,numbers, andthoughts,arenotexcludedfromthedomainsthismonographwantstoinclude initssemantics.Butinnowaydothesedynamicobjectsfigureasprimarytargets. Amorelikelyinterpretationofthetitlewouldbethatthemonographexemplifiesa sortofsemantictheoryaccordingtowhichmeaningsaredynamic.This,aswell,is notthecorrectinterpretation,butitdeservessomespecialattention. Therearegood,philosophical,linguistic,andcomputational,reasonsforthinking of meanings, whatever they are, as some sort of dynamic entities. Meanings can beconceivedofasproofs,orprocesses,orcomputations,orpatterns,orpotentials. There is a whole variety of dynamic objects which, as has been argued for in the literature, constitutes the kinds of things we are concerned with if we talk about meanings.Honestly,Iamverysympathetictotheseideas,andIsubscribetothem, butthisconceptionofmeaningisstillnottheoneintendedwhenItalkaboutdynamic semantics in this monograph. Such a dynamic conception of meaning will be left untouchedthroughoutthismonograph,eventhoughitmay,throughout,replacethe static conception employed or assumed in the monograph. The monograph is not aboutdynamicmeanings,eventhoughyoucan,ifyouwant,construeitthatway. So, then, what is the dynamic thing about the semantics which this monograph talksabout,grantedthatwehavesomeunderstandingofthetermsemantics?Iwill adoptaveryconservativeunderstandingoftheterm“semantics”,whichdealswiththe P.J.E.Dekker,DynamicSemantics,StudiesinLinguisticsandPhilosophy91, 1 DOI:10.1007/978-94-007-4869-9_1, ©SpringerScience+BusinessMediaDordrecht2012 2 1 Introduction interpretationof“expressions”insomeindependentlymotivateddomainof“mean- ings”. This assumes an abstract domain of expressions, to be uncovered by some syntactic theory, and a domain of meaning and use, to be covered by a pragmatic theory.Thetwoassumptionsarehighlycontroversial,andwillalsonotbeleftundis- putedintheremainderofthemonograph,buttheyarenotthetargetofdiscussion. Theyprovideagoodstartingpoint,ifonlyfromthecurrenttheoreticallinguisticstate oftheart,andforthemomentIwouldliketoleaveitatthat.The“dynamics”ofthe semanticsinthismonographdoesnotlieinthemeaningsassignedtowell-formed expressions,but,rather,inthecompositionofthesemeanings. In accordance with a very intuitive and well-established tradition, and appro- priately attributed to the mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege, linguistic constructionsarecomposedoftheirparts,andsoaretheirmeanings.Therearevar- ious reasons to get bewildered by this quite obvious observation. One of these is theequallyobviousobservationthatthesameconstituentexpressionmayfigurein differentcompoundconstructions;anotheristhatoneandthesame(compound)con- structionmaycontainmultipleoccurrencesofoneandthesameconstituentexpres- sion. (This does not happen with houses and the bricks they are built from.) This means that, even though we can agree on the idea or the notion of a constituent expression, and of its meaning (provided that we can make sense of these notions anyway)westillcanquestionanddiscussthevariouswaysinwhichanexpression withitsmeaningcancombineorconjoinwithanotherconstituentexpression.What somehavelabeledthedynamicsofnaturallanguage,comesdowntopreciselythis dynamiccomposition,orconjunction,ofexpressionsandtheirmeanings. Almostallsemantictheoriesare,willinglyorunwillingly,dynamic.Alltheories consciouslyorinadvertentlyagreethatinterpretationisdependentoncontext,ifonly ontheagentperformingtheinterpretation,oronthelanguageemployed.Somemay havedoubtsaboutthesignificanceofthis,andprefertoabstractawayfromthistype ofcontextdependence,butitcanhardlybedeniedthatinterpretationprocesses,and co-occurring belief states are essentially indexical. We don’t want to go as far as proving that one exists from the premise that one believes, but it surely seems to beapresuppositionthataspokenwordcannotdowithoutaspeaker,thatawritten worddoesn’tcomewithoutawriter,andthataninterpretationrequiresaninterpreter. Someuniversalfeaturesofnaturallanguageessentiallyreflectthesefacts.Itappears that all natural languages have either grammaticalized their personal, spatial and temporal dependence, if they haven’t made it part of their default meaning. And alsoallinterpretedformallanguages,iffullyandappropriatelyspecifiedintheright handbooks,havetorelatetheirkeyconceptsrelativetoalanguageandamodelfor ∗ ∗ thatlanguage—normallythelanguagewithitsinterpretation currently discussed inthehandbook.Somethingsaresoessentialthattheyeasilygounnoticed. First and second person pronouns, indexicals or demonstratives, third person pronouns, tenses and temporal adverbs, all display essentially contextual aspects of meaning, which, nevertheless, work in a cross-contextual way. We can quite successfully state the meaning of the Dutch first person pronoun “ik” by saying that it, always, refers to the speaker. This may be many speakers, an in principle unboundednumberofthem,butitisstillonemeaning.Yetitappearsthat“ik”never 1 Introduction 3 means,orshouldbeintendedtomean,what“thespeaker”means.WhenIsaythat itisnotsurprisingthatIamshort-sighted,forinstancebecauseitisnotsurprising thatIam,Idonotmeanthatitisnotsurprisingthatthespeakerofmyutteranceis short-sighted,becausewhyshouldashort-sightedpersonsuddenlysayso?Basically thesameobservationspertaintothetemporalreferenceinArthurN.Prior’s“Thank Goodness that’s over.” Or to take an example from Peter T. Geach, if everybody thinks thathe isclever, soif Ithink Iam clever, and you think you are clever too, andeverybodythinksso,thenwhatexactlyistheverysamethingthateverybodyis thinking? Thepronounsfromnaturallanguages,andthevariablesfromformallanguages, sharethefeatureofbeingsocontext-driventhattheyseemtobebasicallyuseless.In practice,theyaresoessentialthatitisdifficulttodowithoutthem.Itmayrequiresome first graduate training to indeed ∗read∗ the predicate logical formula “∃x(STUx ∧ ¬∃y(PROy∧ADMxy))”asawayofrenderingthemeaningof“Somestudentadmires noprofessor.”Ittakes,itseems,ageniustoreadWillardvanOrmanQuine’svariable freeequivalentE(R(STU ×N(E(R(I(PRO×ADM))))))thesameway.(Quine’s renderingonlyinvolvesacoupleoflogicaloperationsonthepredicatesSTU,PRO andADM.)Pronouns,Ibelieve,arenotonlyessential,butalsoessentiallypractical. Historically, the discussion about the dynamic composition of meanings has focusedonlinguisticconstructionswithpronominalelements,orwithopenplaces, or expressions which are otherwise incomplete. Surely it is easy to make fun of a dynamicsemanticenterprisebysayingitdealsonlywithpronounswhicharewords oflength3(‘she’)orless(‘he’,or‘I’,or‘∅’).Butonceonerealizesthe‘essential indexical’natureofnaturallanguage,ase.g.,SaulKripke,JohnPerry,DavidLewis andrecentlyFrançoisRecanatihaveobserved,thentheindexical,orreferential,or anaphoric potential of expressions is not at all so trivial. The quite obvious fact thatoneandthesameexpression,evenunderoneandthesameanalysis,mayhave differentinterpretationsindifferentcontextshasfar-reachinglogicalconsequences. Aristotle’smostbelovedsyllogismBarbarafailsinthepresenceofpronounsaswe willalsoseeinChap.2ofthismonograph.IfweactlikethosewhofollowedGottlob Frege,butnotlikeFregehimself,wemightblamenaturallanguageanditsanaphoric devices for being imperfect, and get them out of the way; if we, however, want to livewithoursituatednature,wemayhavetofacethelogicalcomplicationsofthe practicalmeritsofhavingpronouns.Thisiswhatthismonographisabout.Ihopeto showtothereaderthatevenaverysuperficialanalysisofpronounsdoescomplicate ourlogic,yetdoesnotmakeitillogical,andthatthephenomenadonottoforceus tochangeourconceptofmeaning,evenifonemayofcoursefindotherreasonsto doso. Formally speaking I do little more than the following. In Chap.2 I extend the architectureofinterpretationofpredicatelogicwithacategoryofpronouns.WhydoI dothis?Inthefirstplace,firstorderpredicatelogicisthemostminimal,well-behaved and well-studied logical formalism that can be taken to model natural language structures besides those of its logical connectives, or their counterparts. Taking a liberalviewonthekindsofthingsonemayquantifyover,itsexpressivepowerisquite impressiveindeed.Addingpronounsessentiallymeansaddingcontextdependence,
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