May 30th: Daniel Rothschild
May 22nd, 2008 by agray
On May 30th from 11:00am-1:00pm in the Landahl Center, Daniel Rothschild (Columbia University) will be giving a talk. The title and abstract are below.
Making Dynamic Semantics Explanatory
Heim’s classic paper “On the Projection Problem for Presuppositions” proposed a replacement of truth-conditional semantics with a dynamic semantics that treats meanings as instructions to update the common ground. Heim showed that this system easily predicts the basic pattern of presupposition projection (the way presuppositions of complex sentences are inherited from the presuppositions of their parts). The classic objection to this program, widely considered definitive, is that the dynamic semantics for binary connectives is stipulative, and other, equally natural treatments fail to make the right predictions about presupposition projection. I give a variation on Heim’s system that is designed to escape this objection.