Surface Composition as Bridging

Presupposition and Implicature

“…One of the central early achievements of dynamic approaches to semantics was an elegant set of techniques for tracking the anaphoric connections between a wide range of nominals across discourses (Karttunen, 1976;Kamp, 1981;Heim, 1982;Groenendijk & Stokhof, 1991;Chierchia, 1995;Beaver, 2001;Bittner, 2001). In such systems, much of the work is handled by presuppositions: indefinites presuppose that their referents are novel (discourse new), while definites, pronouns, and proper names presuppose that their referents are discourse old.…”

“…This is likely true of Grice's (1975) conception, but criticisms based on this idea tend to presuppose a static view of semantic interpretation. In dynamic accounts, where many subparts of a sentence correspond to meaningful units (Bittner, 2001(Bittner, , 2003, there is hardly ever a wait for propositional information, so even Griceanism need not preclude incremental pragmatic enrichment (Sedivy, 2007;Grodner & Sedivy, 2008) or local implicatures.…”

Topical Referents for Individuals and Possibilities

“…This basic idea can be made formally precise by extending the Logic of Clumge with Centering of Bittner (2001 ). This logic -unlike competing formal theories of centering (e.g., Stone & Hardt 1997) -crucially allows for structured centers, with n-tuples of central drer s of any type.…”

“…In contrast to classical dynamic systems (such as Kamp & Reyle 1993), dref s are not variables, but actual semantic objects that are prominent enough to be referred to by anaphoric demonstratives (as in Dekker 1994, Bittner 2001. For our purposes, we need four types of dref s -individuals, possibilities, individual concepts, and possibility concepts (types e, W, E, and Q).…”

“…In clause (ii), DRS boxes are interpreted as in Bittner (2001). Note that the order of the variables in the universe of a box is significant.…”