Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS
Context-dependence and quantifier domains
by Orin Percus
Source: Semantics Archive
These are my lecture notes (i.e. revised handouts) for the EGG 2004 class Covert Variables at LF, co-taught with Luisa Mart? (see. Their general concern is with the phenomenon of context-dependence. Frequently, when a speaker utters a sentence, the pronounced words and the way they are put together do not fully determine our intuitions of when what the speaker said would be true. We see this clearly when, on different occasions when the same sentence is uttered, we have different intuitions about what it would mean for the speaker to have said something true. The issue is how best to treat context-dependence within a theory of how sentences get interpreted. These notes specifically address a kind of context-dependence that surfaces in sentences with quantifiers: the pronounced words do not fully determine what the domain of quantification is.
The notes rely heavily on Jason Stanley and Zoltan Szab?'s 2000 Mind and Language article "On Quantifier Domain Restriction" and on Kai von Fintel's 1998 web-accessible notes on the same topic, and to some degree (Section 1 particularly) on Fran?ois Recanati's 2003 book Literal Meaning. They are NOTES, and not all examples are attributed to their proper sources, so please check with me before citing anything as mine. Also, please let me know of any serious mistakes that you find. I will try to revise the notes accordingly.
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Posted by Tony Marmo
at 22:27 BST
Updated: Wednesday, 29 September 2004 10:24 BST
