Whamit!

Dynamic semantics is a major formal framework to model anaphora in natural languages.

We’ll start with (a version of) classical dynamic semantics for anaphora which does not account for the possibility of anaphora in ‘bathroom sentences’ (`Either there is no bathroom, or it is upstairs’), and then move to more recent proposals that do. We will also discuss how recent approaches in ‘plural dynamic semantics’ deal with so called quantificational subordination (‘Everybody read a book, and everybody liked it’). I will then move to some work of my own in which I give a static (non-dynamic) reconstruction of what I take to be the major intuitions behind dynamic accounts. I will include a discussion of what makes a proposal static or dynamic.