Presuppositions in Spoken Discourse

Chapter 2
2.4 THE SATISFACTION THEORY
The main competitor of the binding theory is the satisfaction theory. The
satisfaction theory’s roots go back to ideas first presented in Karttunen (1974) and
Stalnaker (1974) and was developed later most completely by Heim (1983). Others
who have worked to develop the theory further are Beaver (1992, 1997). The
satisfaction theory needs a very different kind of semantics than the binding theory,
a semantics that allows for contextual update in a very different way than DRT, and
this semantics actually grew out of the desire to try treat presuppositions. Examples
of semantic systems with these properties include File Change Semantics (Heim
1982), Veltman’s Update Semantics (Veltman 1996) or Dynamic Predicate Logic
(Groenendijk & Stokhof 1991).
In these semantic theories the meaning of a sentence is the way in which it
affects its context; i.e. the potential a linguistic expression has to affect the context
in which it is used. This is very different from the standard static truth-conditional
approach to meaning where the meaning of a sentence is its truth conditions; that
is, knowing what must hold for it to be true. Context change semantics also allows
information update on a context without using any intermediate representation
before interpretation. Note that in this way it differs substantially from DRT, where
a representational level is considered essential, and the representation is then
interpreted in a model. It also means that a context change semantics doesn’t leave
a derivational record of how the context was previous to each update. Each unit of
information contributes to the already given context by updating it to a new
context which contains the information, and no record of the derivation is kept
because the theory doesn’t have a level of representation, and in fact considers it
unnecessary. However, the lack of a level of representation is one of the reasons
why the theory has certain problems in dealing with presuppositions and also one
of the main reasons why it is not an intuitive choice for analyzing presuppositions
in natural discourse with an eye to eventually automating this process.
The satisfaction theory as presented in Heim (1983) works in the following
way, a context is a set of worlds and the meaning of a linguistic expression is its
context change potential, its CCP. How does a sentence affect a context e.g. how
will it affect this set of possible worlds when the sentence is added? Some worlds
will be removed, i.e. all those worlds which are not compatible with the
information contributed by the sentence and we end up with a new set of possible
worlds, e.g. a new context. Given a context c, and a simple sentence S, then
updating c with S, c + S = c’, where c’ is the new context containing only those
worlds where S is true. Look at one of the earlier examples again, given as (54)
below:
(54) S1: Julia has a bicycle. S2: Julia’s bicycle is red.
If we begin with an empty context c (i.e. the set of all worlds) and update this with
the content of S1, (removing all possible worlds where Julia doesn’t exist and where
Julia doesn’t have a new bike from the context) we end up with a new context c’.
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