The Challenge: Non-propositionalism

Recent literature has presented a serious challenge for propositional accounts of content. It has been argued that certain bits of natural language discourse, in particular, modal claims, pose a fundamental challenge for propositional accounts, as they fail to express propositional content even relative to a context. The puzzling linguistic behavior of modal discourse suggests that context simply cannot determine propositional content for such claims. This appears to call for a re-thinking of the interaction between context and content, and their role in communication. Indeed, various non-propositionalist accounts that have been proposed to capture this puzzling behavior call for such re-thinking. Such accounts have received various implementations, for instance, in various expressivist and dynamic update semantics. These accounts deny that modals express ordinary propositional content, and they also deliver a non-classical logic. This chapter introduces the challenge, and the main features of non-propositional accounts that have been proposed as a solution.

Diachronic Semantic Shift of Sequential Conjunction: the Causal to Conditional Path

This paper analyzes the semantic shift of a Japanese construction V-e-bafrom causal to conditional. The conventional meaning of the V-e-ba constructionis a sequential conjunction in the sense of update semantics. The causal meaning in Old Japanese is obtained by an I-implicature, whilethe conditional meaning in Modern Japanese is obtained by Q-implicatures. Theproposed diachronic development is in accordance with Deo’s (2015) EvolutionaryGame Theory model.

Generalized Update Semantics

This paper explores the relationship between dynamic and truth conditional semantics for epistemic modals. It provides a generalization of a standard dynamic update semantics for modals. This new semantics derives a Kripke semantics for modals and a standard dynamic semantics for modals as special cases. The semantics allows for new characterizations of a variety of principles in modal logic, including the inconsistency of ‘p and might not p’. Finally, the semantics provides a construction procedure for transforming any truth conditional semantics for modals into a dynamic semantics for modals with similar properties.

Questioning speech acts

We investigate the sentence-final particle ho from Cantonese, which can stack on topof other sentence-final particles indicating various types of speech acts. We argue that ho is ahigher level question operator that operates at the level of speech acts. More concretely, it takesa speech act (assertion or question) and returns a new interrogative speech act asking whether theinput speech act can be felicitously performed by the addressee. We take the presence of thiskind of higher level question operator in natural language as novel evidence that a mechanism foroperating on speech acts is needed. Building on Farkas and Bruce (2009), Rawlins (2010), Bledinand Rawlins (2017), we develop a mechanism in the style of Update Semantics for operating onspeech acts.Keywords: speech acts, sentence-final particles, Cantonese, update semantics.

Declarative sentences

Chapter 4 develops a compositional implementation of this analysis for evidentials in declarative sentences that does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. In particular, I use an update semantics where both truth‐conditional content and anaphoric potential is encoded (Update with Centering). The formal implementation builds on work in dynamic semantics and the semantics of assertion and questions. This compositional, dynamic implementation integrates the different kinds of semantic contributions discussed in Chapter 3 into a single representation of meaning.

Informative counterfactuals

A single counterfactual conditional can have a multitude of interpretations that differ, intuitively, in the connection between antecedent and consequent. Using structural equation models (SEMs) to represent event dependencies, we illustrate various types of explanation compatible with a given counterfactual. We then formalize in the SEM framework the notion of an acceptable explanation, identifying the class of event dependencies compatible with a given counterfactual. Finally, by incorporating SEMs into possible worlds, we provide an update semantics with the enriched structure necessary for the evaluation of counterfactual conditionals.

Predicate Logic with Anaphora

In this paper I make a case for a separate treatment of (singular) anaphoric pronouns within a predicate logic with anaphora (PLA). Discourse representation theoretic results (from Kamp 1981) can be formulated in a compositional way, without fid­dling with orthodox notions of scope and binding. In contrast with its predecessor dynamic predicate logic (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1991), the system of PLA is a proper extension of ordinary predicate logic and it has a genuine update semantics. Moreover, in contrast with other compositional reformulations of DRT, the seman­tics of PLA remains well within the bounds of ordinary, extensional type theory.

"Normality" in Update Semantics

No abstract.