Explaining presupposition projection with dynamic semantics

Article Sidebar

PDF
Published: Jul 7, 2011
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.4.3
Keywords:
presupposition projection dynamic semantics rewrite rules

Main Article Content

Daniel Rothschild
All Souls College, Oxford University

Abstract

Heim's (1982, 1983b) dynamic semantics provides an attractive system for capturing the basic facts about presupposition projection. A long-standing criticism of this semantics is that it requires for each connective lexical stipulations that are not determined by its truth-conditional meaning. I give a precise formulation of this criticism in terms of what I call a "rewrite semantics". Then, I use this idea of a rewrite semantics to formulate a new version of dynamic semantics. This version does not require stipulations particular to individual connectives, but rather allows a derivation of the presupposition projection properties for each connective from its truth-conditional meaning.

doi:10.3765/sp.4.3

BibTeX info

Article Details

Issue
Vol. 4 (2011)
Section
Main Articles

Articles appearing in Semantics and Pragmatics are published under an author agreement with the Linguistic Society of America and are made available to readers under a Creative Commons Attribution License.