Paul Dekker | University of Amsterdam (original) (raw)

Papers by Paul Dekker

Dynamic Semantics Paul J E Dekker, 2012

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication, 2010

In the last decade the enterprise of formal se- mantics has been under attack from several philos... more In the last decade the enterprise of formal se- mantics has been under attack from several philosophical and linguistic perspectives, and it has certainly suffered from its own scattered state, which hosts quite a variety of paradigms which may seem to be incompatible. It will not do to try and answer the arguments of the critics, because the arguments are often welltaken. The negative conclusions, however, I believe are not. The only adequate reply seems to be a constructive one, which puts several pieces of formal semantics, in particular dynamic semantics, together again. In this paper I will try and sketch an overview of tasks, techniques, and results, which serves to at least suggest that it is possible to develop a coherent overall picture of undeniably important and structural phenomena in the interpretation of natural language. The idea is that the concept of meanings as truth conditions after all provides an excellent start for an integrated study of the meaning and use of natural language, and that an extended notion of goal directed pragmatics naturally complements this picture. None of the results reported here are really new, but we think it is important to re-collect them.

We present and motivate an interpretation of epistemic Might, which is as indexical as its dynami... more We present and motivate an interpretation of epistemic Might, which is as indexical as its dynamic predecessor, but which is formulated in a static semantic framework, which does account for the dynamic pragmatics of information exchange. Might( ) is used to state that holds in a future resolution of the current discourse. These statements are given the intu- itively correct truth-conditions, and this enables an account of their use in inquisitive discourse. Epistemic Modality Epistemic modal operators like Might and Must in En- glish, and semantically related verbs, adverbs and markers, express a kind of possibility or necessity relative to some body of knowledge or evidence. A sen- tence formalized as Might( ) (or: ) is used to express that is not excluded relative to some source of evidence, and Must( ) (or: ) that it is or seems to be entailed by it. In a Kratzer-style semantics such a body of knowledge or evi- dence K is conceived of as a set of possibilities (situations, world...

I want to present a possibly ‘geometrical’, analysis for a formal problem in the interpretation o... more I want to present a possibly ‘geometrical’, analysis for a formal problem in the interpretation of natural language it is a rather abstract problem, but I hope to introduce it by means of some quite simple and informal examples I would like to delve more deeply into the issue by means of two specific examples, worked out fully formally elsewhere the dynamics of presupposition along the lines suggested by Stalnaker the treatment of information structure along the lines of Karttunen and Peters, and van der Sandt and Geurts it will be seen that by distributing aspects of interpretation over various dimensions we receive a brand-new perspective on apparent scope island violations. Paul Dekker (ILLC, UvA) Scope Islands and How to Escape Tbilisi 2007 2 / 10 Radical Pragmaticists and Formal Semanticists The Dark Side and The Naive Some Recent Players and Old Questions some from the ‘dark side’ and some ‘naive’ ones I Robyn Carston, Francois Recanati, Daniel Sperber, Deirdre Wilson I Kent B...

A notion of 'Live Meanings' serves to relativize the ambitions of formal semantics and to strictl... more A notion of 'Live Meanings' serves to relativize the ambitions of formal semantics and to strictly maintain a principle of compositionality; this enables one to enjoy, not deny, ndings of the contextualists-as well as those of cognitive or conceptual semanticists. The paper can be taken to argue for a cohabitation of the distinguished disciplines.

ZAS papers in linguistics, 2006

In the interpretation of natural language one may distinguish three types of dynamics: there are ... more In the interpretation of natural language one may distinguish three types of dynamics: there are the acts or moves that are made; there are structural relations between subsequent moves; and interlocutors reason about the beliefs and intentions of the participants in a particular language game. Building on some of the formalisms developed to account for the first two types of dynamics, I will generalize and formalize Gricean insights into the third type, and show by means of a case study that such a formalization allows a direct account of an apparent ambiguity: the 'exhaustive' versus the 'mention some' interpretation of questions and their answers. While the principles which I sketch, like those of Grice, are motivated by assumptions of rationality and cooperativity, they do not presuppose these assumptions to be always warranted.

The Review of Symbolic Logic, 2016

This paper presents a proof system for discourse representation theoretic reasoning and dynamic p... more This paper presents a proof system for discourse representation theoretic reasoning and dynamic predicate logical inference. It gives a sound and complete characterization of the dynamic declaration of discourse referents and the essentially indexical means to refer back to them. The indexical outlook upon discourse reference is argued to further our understanding of some issues deemed relevant both theoretically (philo-logically) and practically (computationally).

In this paper we first combine and refine the semantics of questions and answers (Groenendijk and... more In this paper we first combine and refine the semantics of questions and answers (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1984) and the logic of interrogation (Groenendijk 1999) in order to deal with topical restriction, constituent answerhood and conditional questions in a compo- sitional way. The proposal builds on insights from the structured meanings approaches to questions (von Stechow 1991; Krifka 1991). We next present a global, pragmatic perspec- tive on the use of such questions and answers, which founds and furthers work of (Bu¨ ring 1999; Ginzburg 1996; Roberts 1996) on information structure.

J Comput Phys, 1996

In this paper we s h o w that the dynamic interpretation techniques of Janssen (assignment modali... more In this paper we s h o w that the dynamic interpretation techniques of Janssen (assignment modalities), Groenendijk and Stokhof (dynamic binding), and Hendriks (exibly scoping rules) enable a rigorous formulation of the semantics of intersentential anaphoric relationships, as well as of telescoping and periscoping phenomena in natural language.

Information structure is the term designating a very lively and active branch of work, which deal... more Information structure is the term designating a very lively and active branch of work, which deals with various topics such as anaphora, topical restriction, questions, congruence and exhaustification. This work tends to diverge in many directions which hardly can be seen to be compatible with one another. In this paper we attempt to improve the situation by trying to develop the minimal formal tools required to study the logical properties of the various issues involved and integrate them step by step. We successively deal with anaphoric connections between pronouns and other terms in terms of individual satisfaction by possible witnesses; with questions and topics in terms of sets of possible witnesses; with topical restriction and answerhood in terms of topical satisfaction; we conclude with a compositional deconstruction of Henk Zeevat's exhaustification operation.

Approaches to Meaning, 2014

In this paper I argue that the principle of compositionality should be thought of as a principle ... more In this paper I argue that the principle of compositionality should be thought of as a principle that applies to the live meanings of constituent expressions. Under such a conception of the principle contextualist findings in the philosophy of language can be handled in an intuitive and non-trivial way. Several cases, most of them known from the semantics literature, are addressed in order to illustrate the presence of live meanings. The live principle also grounds a so-called interference principle, that is used as a methodological tool for a fair judgement of proposed semantic explanations of various intricate linguistic phenomena.

Journal of Language and Computation, 1999

In this paper we show that the dynamic interpretation techniques of Janssen (assignment modalitie... more In this paper we show that the dynamic interpretation techniques of Janssen (assignment modalities), Groenendijk and Stokhof (dynamic binding), and Hendriks (flexibly scoping rules) enable a rigorous formulation of the semantics of intersentential anaphoric relationships, as well as of telescoping and periscoping phenomena in natural language.

Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, 2012