On appositives and dynamic binding

Abstract

Quantified appositives have a limited distribution which is reminiscent of quantified discourse anaphora. This article investigates whether this parallel can be fleshed out by means of a two-dimensional dynamic semantics. The proposal works towards an explanation of why quantified appositives are generally infelicitous. Crucial is the fact that variables bound by a strong quantifier have a singular value, while the antecedents for discourse anaphora introduced by the quantifier are plural.

Crossing the appositive / at-issue meaning boundary

“…Recent literature has provided partial evidence against this strong separation, but its systematicity has been underappreciated. For example, Nouwen (2007) shows that at least certain kinds of anaphora cross the appositive / at-issue boundary freely and Amaral et al (2007) do so for both anaphora and presupposition; such facts were also noted by Potts (2005: 51-54) and Potts (2009). Drawing heavily on examples from Davies's (2008-) Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) we show that this pattern holds of anaphora generally, as well as most ellipsis processes.…”

“…The most straightforward way to implement this is by using left and right comma operators following Nouwen (2007). While for Nouwen, these operators toggle back and forth between two Pottsian dimensions, for us, they toggle back and forth between p cs and p. That is, a left comma operator indicates that subsequent content should update p cs while the right comma toggles back to updating p itself.…”

Presupposition and Implicature

“…Indeed, following Bach (1999), I am forced to conclude that many of the items listed in Table 2 are just secondary at-issue entailments. This logical approach is explored further by Barker et al (2010), and related ideas are given a dynamic treatment by Nouwen (2007) and AnderBois et al (2010). Bach (2006b) and Horn (2007) argue that my formalization is not true to Grice's (1975) intentions, andMcCready (2010), Gutzmann (2008Gutzmann ( , 2012, and others have developed modifications of my original multidimensional logic that exist somewhere between Karttunen & Peters' and my own in the sense that they allow for some dimensional interactions (non-trivial projection) while still identifying the strongly projective cases as a natural class.…”

Sluicing as anaphora to issues

“…Recent work, however, has shown that this separation does not extend to anaphora in general (Nouwen 2007, Amaral, Roberts & Smith 2007 or to ellipsis more specifically . For example, VP-ellipsis can operate more or less freely across the at-issue/appositive boundary as in (34).…”