Presuppositions and Pronouns - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

120 Presuppositions and Pronouns
the observation that utterances change the context. However this may be,
one premise of dynamic semantics is that sentences are context change
devices, or, in Heim's terminology, that the meaning of a sentence is given by
its context change potential, or CCP for short. A further one is that 'the
CCPs of complex sentences can be given compositionally on the basis of the
CCPs of their constituents.' (Heim 1983) To see how these two assumptions
naturally, though not necessarily, give rise to the claim that conjunction is
dynamic, compare the following examples with (2a, b):
(3) a. [A manl man]. walks in the park. He t i
whistles, whistles.
b. He { i
whistles. [A man]; L walks in the park.
The contrast is clearly the same as in the earlier example: in (3a) anaphora is
possible, and in (3b) it isn't. We should expect, therefore, that an explanation
of the contrast in (3) will apply to (2), as well. In a dynamic semantics
perspective, the difference between (3a) and (3b) is the following. In (3a) the
first sentence sets up a context with an antecedent for the pronoun in the
second one. In (3b), on the other hand, the pronoun occurs in a sentence that
is supposed to set up a context for a sentence with the pronoun's antecedent,
which is impossible. But if we want to extend this account to (2a, b), assuming
that the CCP of a conjunction is determined compositionally by the CCPs of
its parts, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the CCP of and is
dynamic. 3
So, although technically speaking it is possible to have a classical, 'static'
conjunction in a theory like DPL, the claim that conjunction is dynamic
follows naturally from the view, which is characteristic of the dynamic
approach, that 'certain aspects of language use enter directly into the
compositional core of a semantic system', as Chierchia (1995: xiii) puts it.
Therefore, Groenendijk and Stokhof's definition of dynamic semantics is
quite appropriate.
Another reason why I find this definition apt is that it draws attention to
the fact that in a dynamic semantics ordinary connectives and quantifiers
carry an inordinately heavy explanatory burden. The contrast between (2a)
and (2b), for example, is explained in terms of the meaning of and. More
generally, the dynamic research programme is to explain pragmatic
3
3 Thus the parallel between the examples in (2) and (3) is used to motivate a dynamic construal
of and. However, as several people have pointed to me, it is much more plausible to interpret
this parallel as demonstrating, on the contrary, that the meaning of and cannot be dynamic. If
the meaning of and is involved in the explanation of contrast in (2), then how are we to account
for the contrast in (3), where there is no linguistic symbol that can be taken to denote '0' '°'
Inevitably, if he wants to save the insight that (2) and (3) are alike in all relevant respects, the
dynamic semanticist is forced to maintain that sentence boundaries mean '°' '0' in the same sense
in which and means '0'. '°'. Indeed, it has been claimed that the full stop denotes '°'. '0'. I am not
making this up: see Muskens (1990), for example.