Discourse Structure and the Structure of Context - Multiple Choices

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The dependence of ''meaning'' on utterance context is hard to miss,
since it is so obvious that what is meant by ''indexical'' expressions like
I, you or now does depend on it. 1 Indeed, it is a dependence of which
theorists have been aware for a very long time. I am not sure how far
this awareness can be traced back. But it clearly goes back to times well
before the beginning, rouhly forty years ago, of formal natural
language semantics as we know and practise it today. For instance,
explicit analyses of the role of utterance context can be found in
[Russell, ??] and in [Reichenbach, El. of Symb Log.] Utterance context
played a central role in the logical and semantical studies of the sixties
and seventies that is sometimes referred to as the ''California School'',
exemplified by the seminal work of Montague, Scott, Kaplan and Lewis
Today this role of utterance context is perhaps best-known through the
three-level theory of meaning of Kaplan's 'Demonstratives'. Kaplan's
theory has also been characterised as ''two-dimensional'': one
dimension of semantic dependence is dependence on utterance context,
the other is the dependence on ''circumstances of evaluation. This twodimensionality
is also the hall-mark of the closely related account of
assertion, presupposition and the communication of information that
was proposed in the early seventies by Stalnaker. [ref. Assertion,
Pragmatics,..]
The second context notion which admits of precise definitions is that of
the discourse context, as it is used in theoreis of Dynamic Semantics.
The concern common to all these theories is to account for the
1 Note that I am using ``meaning'' in a non-technical sense. It is common for
accounts of the semantics of a word like I to claim that the word has a fixed meaning,
but that its refrerence depends on utterance context, and that the referent of a given
occurrence of I is obtained by 'applying' this fixed meaning to the context of that
occurrence. (So, if utterance contexts are tuples made up of speaker, utterance time
and, as the case may be, addressee, then the meaning of I will simply be the projection
function which selects the first component of each such tuple.) The pretheoretical
use of ''meaning'' to which I have helped myself here is not to be confounded with
these more conscious uses. ''Semantic value'' would arguably have done better for my
purpose, except that this really has the ring of a term of art.
I am making a similarly unreflected use of the term 'interpretation'. The main
difference with 'meaning' is that 'interpretation' is used to refer to the process of
determining the meaning of a bit of language, as well as to the results of such
processes. These results will, according to one of the basic assumptions on which the
approach of this paper rests, always be representations which capture the meanings
that interpretation processes aim to identify.
Given the formal framework which the later parts of the paper presuppose these loose
uses of terms that have been given well-defined, specific definitions in th literature
are of no consequence.