Aspect in Ancient Greek - Nijmegen Centre for Semantics

26 Chapter 3. Aspect in formal semanticsthe name John and y introduced by the indefinite NP a dog. 3 These discoursemarkers will figure as the referents for these expressions for the remainder ofthe discourse. The idea is that indefinite expressions like a dog introduce discoursereferents in the discourse. Definite expressions like it or the dog, on theother hand, pick up previously introduced referents, as we will see when wediscuss the interpretation of the second sentence of (25). The descriptive informationis encoded in the conditions john(x), dog(y), and own(e,x,y). Thesemantics of DRT specifies that (27) is true in a model M iff there is a functionf that maps the discourse markers e, x, and y onto entities in the domain ofM in such a way that f(x) has the property of having the name John and ofowning f(y), f(y) has the property of being a dog and of being owned by f(x),and f(e) is an eventuality of owning between the two individuals.Note that we don’t need a conjunction in DRT, since it’s already specifiedin the truth definition that a sequence of conditions gets the meaning thatpredicate logic would express by means of a conjunction. The same holds forexistential quantification: the discourse markers in (27) get their existentialimport indirectly from the truth definition, which requires that there be afunction that verifies the DRS in the model.Let’s now move on to the second sentence. It is interpreted in the contextof the first sentence. 4 Following the two-stage presuppositionasanaphora versionof DRT (van der Sandt 1992) (which is standard nowadays and which isadopted in this work), we first construct the preliminary representation of thesecond sentence:(28)e ′like(e ′ ,z,u)zmale(z)unon-human(u)This preliminary DRS contains three conditions. Apart from the simple conditionlike(e ′ ,z,u), we find two complex conditions, the dashed boxes, correspondingto the anaphoric expressions he and it. These anaphoric expressionscome, in contrast to indefinites like a dog, with a special instruction: theyshould link up to a previously established discourse referent. This is indicatedby encoding them as a special type of condition which is itself constructed out3 I have chosen the traditional way of doing things in DRT by representing the propername as a variable whose reference is restricted by a predicate rather than as a constant.4 This is a simplification. The real context for the interpretation of the second sentencedoes not only contain the information provided by the first sentence, but all backgroundknowledge, including, for example, world knowledge.