Modeling the Dynamic Effects of Discourse: Principles and Frameworks

In the study of the meaning of natural language expressions, the sentence level provides a natural entry point. Its relevance depends, of course, on the focus we want to put on meaning: as related to thought, to communication, to truth, etc. In this paper, we concentrate on the model theoretic view of meaning, in particular via first-order logic representation. This view is commonly referred to as Montague semantics because of Richard Montague’s influential work, but is not limited there to . It naturally brings in inference capabilities that, for instance, allows us to discuss the consequences that are true of a world a sentence describes. In relating natural language utterances to logical representations, a key feature associated with this view is the compositionality principle. This principle basically states that the meaning of a sentence derives from the meaning of its parts and how they combine syntactically. However, some of these parts can only take on meaning with respect to previously uttered sentences. Typical examples of such parts are pronouns. But they are not the only ones. In Sect. 2 we will present phenomena that illustrate the challenges posed by discourse to truth-conditional semantics and compositionality. We will show in Sect. 2.1 that proposals to address these challenges rely on the additional device of contexts and on the way sentences can access and modify these contexts. This capability is usually referred to as the context change potential of a sentence. Depending on the phenomenon, contexts need to represent different kinds of information: propositions, discourse referents, and