Speaker: Philippe Schlenker (Institut Jean-Nicod and NYU)
Time: Friday, May 1st 2009, 3.30pm-5pm
Place: 32-141
Title: Local Contexts: Problems and Extensions
Since the 1980’s, it has been standard to assume that the presupposition of an expression must be entailed by its local context (Heim 1983). But how is a local context derived from the global one? Analyses developed within dynamic semantics offer a lexicalist solution: the meaning of any operator specifies what its ‘Context Change Potential’ is. However the explanatory depth of these solutions has been called into question because they can in effect stipulate in their lexical entries the data to be accounted for. We will offer a reconstruction of local contexts that circumvents this problem, and can be developed within a classical (non-dynamic) semantics. We will also discuss problems that recent experimental results raise for our analysis.
A non-technical summary of our reconstruction of local contexts is available in:
Schlenker, P. 2009. Presuppositions and Local Contexts, Manuscript, Institut Jean-Nicod and NYUA longer and more technical version is developed in:
Schlenker, P. To appear. Local Contexts. Forthcoming in Semantics and PragmaticsBoth papers are available at https://files.nyu.edu/pds4/public/