Abstract
Most people these days accept the idea that meanings of natural language utterances have a dynamic, context-changing character. You produce an utterance in a context. Your hearer processes this utterance with respect to the context, doing things like anchoring referring expressions, choosing among alternative readings, and perhaps reasoning about why you might have said this, and thus updates his or her view of the world. The notion goes back at least to (Gazdar, 1979), and has been taken up within such theories as situation semantics (Barwise and Perry, 1983), file change semantics (Heim, 1983), discourse representation theory (DRT) (Kamp, 1984; Kamp and Reyle, 1993) and dynamic predicate logic (DPL) (Groenendijk and Stockhof, 1991). A striking property of all these theories apart from (Gazdar, 1979) is that in order to accommodate the idea that meanings are dynamic they provide extensions to classical logic.
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Ramsay, A. (1999). Dynamic and Underspecified Interpretation without Dynamic or Underspecified Logic. In: Bunt, H., Muskens, R. (eds) Computing Meaning. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 73. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4231-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4231-1_3
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