No description available.

I present and defend an account of indexicals that treats indexicals as presuppositional expressions. I argue that the distinction between presupposed and asserted content can replace the more restrictive distinction between character and content that is characteristic of Kaplanian, two-dimensional views. My account, "Presuppositional Indexicals" (PI), is simpler than a two-dimensional account because it does not posit a special layer of meaning for indexicals that cannot interact with truth-conditional content. PI also has broader scope than two-dimensional theories. It opens the door to a general theory of definite noun phrases according to which all definites have two components to their meaning: an asserted component, which contributes new information to a discourse, and a presuppositional component, which determines where asserted information will be attached in a discourse. PI does not stipulate rigidity or referentiality for indexicals as many other theories do. Indexicals do receive a special semantic treatment in PI, but their special semantics are captured entirely in terms of a strategy that indexicals exhibit for the resolution of their presuppositions. / text

I develop a novel semantic theory for modals that has important consequences for contemporary work in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics. My theory replaces the dominant view about semantics--that our best theory of meaning should ascribe truth-conditions to modalized sentences--with a non-truth-conditional yet fully compositional semantics for modals. Its contributions to current debates in analytic philosophy include an explanation of the possibility of modal disagreement that avoids relativism, a solution to the paradoxes about conditional obligations (including the gentle murder paradox), and new impulses for a generalized solution to the Frege-Geach problem for noncognitivism. / text

Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-14T12:43:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 1068366 bytes, checksum: 77b198469317d4c179ff3c7a38f64a90 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-05-08 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This work aims to present a dynamic analysis of presupposition in journalistic news, to point how the presupposed information is altered and how it contributes to the textual development. The study of presupposition is justified by the important discursive role that this linguistic phenomenon performs: it works as an element of cohesion and coherence it prevents the repetition, promotes the semantic recurrence, and establishes the condition of progression. Presupposition is an implicit information linguistically marked by expressions, presupposition triggers, that can be present in simple periods and can be, or not, projected to complex periods. In a dynamic approach, we can consider presupposition beyond the limit of the period, and see it in the textual whole, observing the relevance of the permanence, cancellation or change of the presupposed information. It is important to show that, in some cases, presuppositions are pieces of information that can only be understood clearly by considering the situational context in which they are produced. Our analysis follows a dynamic approach and the corpus is constituted by texts from the newspapers Folha de São Paulo and UOL Notícias. The option for this kind of text was made due to the intention to show the phenomenon of the presupposition in real use situations, and the news, an example of contemporaneous verbal communication with wide social presence, is also a case of a genre in use. The analysis points to the presence of important initial presuppositions, which can be kept in some cases, and cancelled in others, and shows how presuppositional dynamic contributes to the construction of the text. / Esta dissertação tem o objetivo de apresentar uma análise dinâmica da pressuposição em notícias jornalísticas, apontar como vão sendo alteradas as informações pressupostas e de que maneira isso contribui para o desenvolvimento textual. Tal estudo sobre a pressuposição se justifica pelo importante papel discursivo que esse fenômeno linguístico desempenha: funciona como elemento de coesão e coerência evita a repetição, promove a recorrência semântica e estabelece condição de progressão. A pressuposição é uma informação implícita marcada linguisticamente por expressões, ativadores de pressupostos, que pode estar presente em períodos simples e ser, ou não, projetada para períodos complexos. Numa abordagem dinâmica, podem-se considerar os pressupostos além da dimensão do período, vendo a pressuposição no todo textual, observando a relevância da permanência, cancelamento ou atualização das informações pressupostas. É importante destacar que, em alguns casos, os pressupostos são informações que só podem ser entendidas de forma clara se considerado o contexto situacional em que são produzidos, assim, são as informações compartilhadas pelos falantes no background que permitem conhecer essas informações pressupostas. Nossa análise da pressuposição tem como base a abordagem dinâmica e como corpus textos colhidos dos jornais Folha de S. Paulo e UOL Notícias. A opção por esse tipo de texto se deu pelo desejo de mostrar o fenômeno da pressuposição em situações reais de uso, e a notícia, além de ser um exemplar de comunicação verbal contemporânea de grande acesso, é representação de um gênero em uso. A análise aponta a presença de pressuposições iniciais importantes, que podem ser mantidas em alguns casos, e canceladas em outros. No decorrer da análise, apontamos de que forma a dinâmica pressuposicional contribui para a construção do texto.

No description available.

No description available.

The overarching topic of this dissertation is the semantics and pragmatics of definite descriptions. It focuses on the question whether sentences such as ‘the king of France is bald’ literally assert the existence of a unique king (and therefore are false) or simply presuppose the existence of such a king (and thus fail to express propositions). One immediate obstacle to resolving this question is that immediate truth value judgments about such sentences (sentences with non-denoting descriptions) are particularly unstable; some elicit a clear intuition of falsity whereas others simply seem awkward or strange. Because of these variations, truth value judgments are generally considered unreliable. In the first chapter of the dissertation, an explanation of this phenomenon is developed. It is observed that when these types of sentences are considered in the context of a discourse, a systematic pattern in judgments emerges. This pattern, it is argued, should be explained in terms of certain pragmatic factors, e.g. whether a speaker’s utterance is interpreted as cooperative. A detailed and general explanation of the phenomenon is then presented which draws importantly on recent research in the semantics and pragmatics of questions and focus. It is shown that the behavior of these judgments can be systematically explained, that truth value judgments are not as unreliable as standardly assumed, and that the proposed explanation best supports the conclusion that definite descriptions presuppose rather than assert existence. In the second chapter, the following problem is investigated. If definite descriptions are assumed to literally assert existence, a sentence such as ‘Hans wants the ghost in his attic to be quiet’ is incorrectly predicted to be true only if Hans wants there to be a (unique) ghost in his attic. This prediction is often considered evidence against Russell’s quantificational analysis and evidence in favor of the referential analysis of Frege and Strawson. Against this claim, it is demonstrated that this problem is a general problem about the existence commitments of natural language determiners, i.e. not an argument in favor of a referential analysis. It is shown that in order to avoid these undesirable predictions, quite radical changes to the semantic framework are required. For example, it must be assumed that a sentence of the form ‘The F is G’ has the open sentence ‘x is G’ as its asserted content. A uniform quantificational and presuppositional analysis of definites and indefinites is outlined which by exploiting certain features of so-called dynamic semantics unproblematically assumes that the asserted contents indeed are open sentences. In view of the proposed quantificational/presuppositional analysis, the dissertation is concluded by a rejection of the argument put forward by Reimer (1998) and Devitt (2004) that definite descriptions are ambiguous between attributive (quantificational) and referential (indexical) uses. Reimer and Devitt’s argument is (in contrast to Donnellan, 1966) based primarily on the assumption that definite descriptions are conventionally used to communicate singular thoughts and that the conventional meaning of a definite description therefore must be fundamentally indexical/directly referential. I argue that this argument relies crucially on tacit assumptions about semantic processing for which no empirical evidence is provided. I also argue that the argument is too general; if sound, it would be an argument for an indexical treatment of most, if not all, other determiners. I then conclude by demonstrating that the view does not explain any new data and thus has no clear motivation. In short, this dissertation provides a detailed pragmatic explanation of a long-standing puzzle about truth value judgments and then outlines a novel dynamic semantic analysis of definites and indefinites. This analysis solves a significant problem about existence commitments — a problem that neither Russell’s nor the Frege/Strawson analysis are equipped to handle. This analysis is then defended against the claim that definite descriptions are ambiguous.

Donkey pronouns seem to defy the conventional categories of referential and anaphoric pronouns and hence cannot be analyzed as variables. An orthodox treatment is that donkey pronouns are semantically equivalent to definite descriptions. I argue on the contrary that donkey pronouns can be analyzed as bound variables given a distinct notion of binding. I provide a systematic comparison between the static, description-theoretic approach and Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), a representative of dynamic semantics. By exposing the inadequacy of various descriptivist theories, I motivate and argue that DRT is the better alternative. DRT is superior for being a coherent and flexible analysis of donkey pronouns, a unified analysis of pronouns in general, and an intuitively appealing model of meaning. In addition, I uncover the similarities between the situational descriptivist account and DRT. I show that when fully elaborated, the former turns out to be a notational variant of the latter. I then trace their common problems to the Lewisian assumptions of quantification and conditionals; my proposed solutions suggest non-trivial modifications to and clarifications of the underlying Lewisian framework. / text

Cette thèse développe un formalisme théorique pour la sémantique du discours. Il s'appuie sur l'extension des grammaires de Montague, sur la notion de continuation et sur les mécanismes de levée et de traitement des exceptions. Le formalisme permet de traiter des phénomènes dynamiques tels que les anaphores d'une phrase à l'autre, les présuppositions déclenchées par des référents et les projections présuppositions. / This thesis develops a theoretical formalism that takes into account semantical discourse dynamics. It focuses on the extension of Montague semantic with the notion of continuation and an exception handling and raising mechanism. The formalism allows to handle dynamic phenomena such as cross-sentential anaphora, presuppositions triggered by referring expressions and presupposition projection.

Cette thèse prend ses racines dans la tradition sémantique montagovienne et dynamique standard. L’objet est les conditions dans lesquelles un syntagme nominal peut agir comme antécédent d'une expression anaphorique. Le travail porte sur l'accessibilité des référents de discours dans un système formel de la sémantique dynamique. Le cadre choisi est celui proposé par De Groote, type théorique Dynamic Logic (TTDL) car il fait appel à des outils mathématiques et logiques standards, qui permettent de conserver le principe de compositionnalité. Nous étendons la couverture de la gestion de l’accessibilité des référents dans TTDL à deux cas naturellement problématique pour les théories sémantiques dynamiques classiques, en particulier, l'anaphore sous la double négation et les modalités. Une adaptation est définie pour chaque cas et enfin, l'intégration des différentes solutions est proposée, ce qui montre la souplesse de TTDL. / This thesis has its roots in the standard Montagovian and dynamic semantic tradition. The subject is conditions under which a noun phrase may act as antecedent of a particular anaphoric expression. The work thesis deals with the accessibility of discourse referents using a formal system of dynamic semantics. The framework used is the one proposed by De Groote, Type Theoretic Dynamic Logic (TTDL) because it follows the Montagovian tradition and only makes use of standard mathematical and logical tools which allows to maintain compositionnality. We extend the coverage of TTDL to cases which are naturally problematic for classical dynamic semantic theories. In particularly, this thesis aims to extend TTDL's coverage of the accessibility of referents to two exceptions of classical dynamic theories, namely anaphora under double negation and modality. An adaptation is defined for each case and finally, an integration of various solutions is proposed, which shows the flexibility of TTDL