Chris Barker, NYU Linguistics, chris.barker@nyu.edu
Utterances do things: they hire and inquire, they warn and they inform. And so dynamic theories of meaning model both the content and some portion of the effect of an utterance. This is a presumptuous thing to do, since uptake depends on many factors, of which content is just one. Do we need dynamic theories just to compute content? (Yes!) Should we even try to compute uptake? (Good luck...)
We'll begin with the classic dynamic semantics of the 80s and 90s, working up to Groenendijk, Stokhof and Veltman's 95 Coreference and Modality. We'll follow with a more nuanced and skeptical phase, exploring a rich body of work from Rutgers. Finally, we'll consider Goodman and Frank's Rational Speech Act framework, which provides tools for reasoning about the relationship between content and uptake.
This course welcomes philosophers and linguists from NYU, CUNY, Rutgers, Columbia, and beyond.
There will be plenty of linguisticy empirical data detail, but we will keep philosophical issues in view as we evaluate proposals.
Mode and coordinates: the seminar will be conducted remotely via Zoom. The first meeting is on Wednesday 3 February 2021 from 15:30 till 17:30 New York time. The zoom link is https://nyu.zoom.us/j/97945726284. If you're interested, but you can't make the first zoom meeting for some reason, please write to me at chris.barker@nyu.edu.
Historical note: I last taught a seminar on dynamic semantics in 2008. We'll be engaging with the work of several people who participated in that earlier seminar.
Related NYU seminar: Mandelkern, Conditionals and epistemic modals, Thu 11-1. Matt's slogan for the seminar: "there's something dynamic about language, but we can't account for that by folding those dynamics into the truth/update conditions of our connectives."
Thanks to Dan Harris, Jeremy Kuhn, and Matt Mandelkern for comments on this syllabus.
See bibliography for full citation details.
- 3 Feb. Overview: sketch of how the seminar might go. I'll present
the simple system of Heim 1983, which aims at anaphora and
presupposition projection. I'll say what it means for a semantics to be dynamic,
and I'll articulate the Dynamic Quandry: either we compute content based on
an ever-changing context beyond our control, or we try to control the context, and fail.
- Slides here.
- Assigned reading: Heim 1983.
- Secondary readings: Lewis 1979 (Scorekeeping); Harris 2019.
- Code:
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10 Feb. Dynamic Predicate Logic. 1991. Gronendijk and Stokhof. Truth conditions of donkey sentences as a dynamic setpiece. Now update is primary, and truth is derived. Predecessor and inspiration: Pratt's Dynamic Logic. Important variants: Dekker's PLA, Musken's CDRT, van den Berg's Plural Information States, de Groote's continuation-based Montagovian dynamics.
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17 Feb. Coreference and Modality. 1996. Gronendijk, Stokhof and Veltmann. Dynamic anaphora meets epistemic update. A high water mark in the old school style of dynamical systems. Fascinating fragment that makes subtle predictions about how epistemic state influences truth. I'll present a refactored fragment based on work of Jim Pryor.
- Handout here.
- Notes on GSV from a seminar Jim Pryor and I taught in 2015.
- Implementation and problem set here
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24 Feb. A case for, and a case against, dynamic semantics, both sides argued by Philippe Schlenker:
- Handout here
- Anti-dynamics. 2007. Validating classical logic should be a design goal. Case study: accounting for presupposition projection in a static semantics.
- The view from sign language. 2011. On the other hand, ASL provides an argument in favor of doing donkeys dynamically.
- Trivalent accounts of presupposition projection. 2014. B. George
- Fragment here: a refactoring of the presupposition part of Heim's fragment that is pointwise (distributive); connectives are lazy, but without trivalence---presupposition failure is handled via a Maybe monad
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3 Mar. [No general meeting; individual conferences with enrolled students]
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10 Mar. Discourse dynamics, pragmatics, and indefinites. 2012. Karen Lewis. Even the ability of an indefinite to contribute a new discourse referent is negotiable.
- Slides here
- Some notes from Karen Lewis for the discussion here [PDF issue has been fixed, 15 Mar]
- An implementation of the fragment in Lewis 2012 here
- Matt Mandelkern's manuscript Witnesses
- Implementation of Mandelkern's fragment here
- Patrick Elliott's manuscript Towards a principled logic of anaphora
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17 Mar. Varieties of update. 2014. Sarah Murray. Some update is non-negotiable, including evidential inferences in Cheyenne.
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24 Mar. Appositive impositions in discourse. 2015. AnderBois, Brasoveanu, and Henderson. Appositives non-negotiably impose their content on the context state. Getting at-issue content right depends on tracking appositive content. This approach is explored at length in Todor Koev's forthcoming OUP book.
- Slides here
- Schlenker, Philippe. 2021. Supplements without Bidimentionalism. here
- Amaral, Roberts, and Smith. 2007. Review of Potts 2005. here
- Koev, Todor. Under contract. Parenthetical meaning. first chapter Comprehensive treatment, evaluting Potts, AnderBois et al., Schlenker, and proposing a dynamic treatment.
- Martin, Scott. 2016. Supplemental Update. Semantics and Pragmatics. here
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31 Mar. A preference semantics for imperatives. 2020. Will Starr. "I will argue that the only way for the non-representationalist to meet these three challenges is to adopt a dynamic semantics. Such a dynamic semantics is proposed here: imperatives introduce preferences between alternatives."
- Slides here. The slides contain a discussion of trivalence; see the notes for week 4 (Schlenker) for a discussion of George 2007, and see Elliott 2020, Rothschild 2017, and Winter 2019 in the bibliography and in the Papers directory for relevant discussion.
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7 Apr. Post-suppositions and semantic theory. 2018ish. Simon Charlow. Two ways of climbing the type hierarchy in a dynamic theory in order to get cummulative readings right. One way lifts the type of generalized quantifiers (split scope). The other lifts the type of propositions (a kind of update semantics). Other dynamic split-scope analyses: Bumford 2018 (the rabbit in the hat), Law 2018 (distributivity), Kuhn to appear (negative concord).
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14 Apr. The dynamics of loose talk. To appear. Sam Carter.
A dynamic account of certain assertions that are not literally true, along with arguments that the treatment must be semantic rather than pragmatic.
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21 Apr. Two papers in apposition (the second paper is 1 page long):
- Semantics without semantic content. 2020. Dan Harris. "A sentence's semantic value is not its content but a partial and defeasible constraint on what it can be used to say."
- Predicting pragmatic reasoning in language games. 2012. Michael Frank and Noah Goodman. A quantitative theory of how general cognition selects among possible contents.
- Slides here
- Cohn-Gordon, Reuben, Noah Goodman, and Christopher Potts. 2018. An Incremental Iterated Response Model of Pragmatics. Manuscript. An RSA model of incremental interpretation that can handle data that is "out of reach" of global models. here
- New draft by Craige Roberts: Imperatives in a dynamic pragmatics. here
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28 Apr. Adjectival vagueness in a Baysian model of interpretation. 2017. Dan Lassiter and Noah Goodman. How vagueness can emerge from reasoning about adjective extensions.
- Wed 5 May, 3:30 -- 5:30
- Four presentations, each 20 minutes, including discussion
- Same link as the normal class; all welcome
- 5 May. Student presentations
- Wed 5 May, 3:30 -- 5:30
- Five presentations, each 20 minutes, including discussion
- Same link as the normal class; all welcome
Schedule:
- Omar Agha
- The role of QUD-relevance in presupposition projection
- Nigel Flower
- The dynamics of presuppositional islands
5 minute break
- Zhuoye Zhao
- Supplement projection and discourse coherence
- Chris Barker
- Composing local contexts
- Slides here