Spatio-Temporal Structure in Text

Abstract

One of the perceived difficulties with the Montagovian framework of intensional logic in the seventies was that is was not well suited to the analysis of intersentential temporal and pronominal anaphora.¹This perception spurred the growth of so called dynamic semantics (Kamp 1979 and 1981, Heim 1982, Groenendijk and Stokhof 1987), according to which the meaning of a sentence is not a set of possible worlds but rather a function from context consisting of a set of pairs of a world an assignment function (a context) to another such set (the context updated with the information content of the sentence). Recently, the framework of intentional logic has been refined so as to take account of the advances of dynamic semantics (Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1991). But in futher analyses of intersentential anaphora, it has become clear that for most languages, even a dynamic account of semantics is insufficient to determine the temporal flow of discourse; elsewhere, I have argued that a semantically based account of discourse structure is the crucial ingredient missing that is needed to determine the temporal order of the flow of events in a discourse and the anaphoric possibilities of pronouns (Lascarides and Asher 1991, 1992, 1993, Asher 1993). Of course, in a sense everyone knew this all along. But there were no clear proposals about how the additional information that was needed to determine temporal structure could be added in a principled fashion to semantics until recently.