Binding Alongside Hamblin Alternatives Calls for Variable-free Semantics

A Hamblin Semantics for Evidentials

When speakers enter a conversation, they do so with a shared body of information. As the participants in the conversation speak, what they say affects this common ground. But how exactly is the common ground affected by what they assert? On one view, an assertion updates the common ground (Karttunen 1974, Stalnaker 1975, 1978). A second view is that an assertion is a proposal to update the comm...

Movement, Variables and Hamblin Alternatives

Sets of Hamblin alternatives are often used side by side syntactic movement and variable binding. Shan (2004) shows that previous attempts at defining a Predicate Abstraction rule for variable binding while using sets of alternatives face serious problems: they overgenerate alternatives and/or are incapable of handling binding into a wh-phrase. This paper provides a solution by assuming Poesio’...

A variable-free dynamic semantics

I propose a variable-free treatment of dynamic semantics. By " dynamic semantics " I mean analyses of donkey sentences (Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it) and other binding and anaphora phenomena in natural language where meanings of constituents are updates to information states, for instance as proposed by Groenendijk and Stokhof [3]. By " variable-free " I mean denotational semantics i...

Function Domains in Variable-Free Semantics

Sauerland (1999) used such examples as the basis of an argument in favor of the traditional representation of pronouns as indexed variables, and against Jacobson’s Variable Free Semantics (VFS). In her response, Jacobson defends the VFS framework and argues that it can account for a broader range of examples than Sauerland’s proposal. In particular, Jacobson proposes that we can account for suc...

Paychecks, Stress, and Variable-Free Semantics