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Dynamics and bridging| old_uid | 14439 |
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| title | Dynamics and bridging |
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| start_date | 2014/10/08 |
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| schedule | 09h30-10h20 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | It is a well-known fact that the interpretation of a referential expression often requires a so-called bridging inference:
(1) Human activity in homes and offices takes place in the bottom 6 feet of a room, not up near the ceiling.
It is less well-known that, every now and then, pronouns call for bridging construals, too:
(2) A car’s coming up to the junction and he starts to turn right. (Yule) (3) Maxine was kidnapped but they didn’t hurt her. (Bolinger)
I have argued that bridging allows for an intuitive and exceptionally simple treatment of hairy pronoun occurrences like the following (examples by Karttunen):
(4) You must write a letter to your parents. It has to be sent by email. (5) Harvey courts a girl at every convention. She always comes to the banquet with him.
The proposed analysis straightforwardly extends to donkey anaphora:
(6) If Pedro owns a donkey, he beats it. (7) Every farmer who owns a donkey beats it.
If this is on the right track, then there is no need to suppose that conditionals and quantifiers have a semantics that is (internally) dynamic. Which raises two questions: (i) Are there reasons for preferring one analysis over the other? (ii) If the bridging analysis is to be preferred, how much work will be left for a dynamic semantics? |
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| responsibles | Amblard, Musiol, de groote |
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