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Local Contexts

Paper · 2009 · Philippe Schlenker

Summary

According to dynamic semantics, every presupposition needs to be met within the local context where it appears. However, theories such as Heim 1983 have to stipulate a Context Change Potential for every connective and operator, so they cannot predict how a new operator will pass presuppositions along. Schlenker removes this stipulation. He keeps a classical, bivalent semantics and redefines the local context of an expression E inside a sentence S. It becomes the strongest restriction one can impose on E, the smallest domain one needs to look at, without altering what S means. Under the default incremental version, this is computed using only material to the left of E, and it must hold for any possible continuation. With the rule that presuppositions must be entailed by their local context, the account yields projection facts for connectives, quantifiers and attitude verbs straight from syntax and truth conditions. It nearly coincides with Heim's results but is fully predictive. A symmetric variant, which looks at the whole sentence at some processing cost, predicts gradient judgments.

Key points

  • Published in Semantics and Pragmatics, vol. 2, article 3 (2009), 78 pages. Appendices B–D give a formal implementation, and Appendix A compares the account with Schlenker's Transparency theory.
  • The paper argues against Stalnaker's assertion-based updating in three ways:
    • Disjunctions and negative quantifiers (as in "None of my students…") contain conjuncts that are never asserted.
    • The account cannot explain why "#It is raining but I don't believe it" is odd while the version with "you" is fine.
  • Against Heim 1983, it uses Soames's deviant connective and*, which updates with the second conjunct first. This connective has the same truth conditions as "and" but the wrong projection, which shows that Context Change Potentials are underdetermined by meaning.
  • With conservative quantifiers ("every", "no"), the theory predicts universal presuppositions.
  • With non-conservative "only" ("only bad students have stopped complaining"), the local context is the property of being a student. This predicts an inference that every student used to complain.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Define the context for evaluating a subexpression as the tightest restriction that leaves the whole sentence's truth conditions unchanged, so context falls out of meaning rather than being hand-written per operator.
  • I2. Compute that context incrementally, using only what has been read so far and quantifying over every possible continuation, which models on-line processing.
  • I3. Use a truth-preserving but processing-deviant twin of an operator (and* with reversed update order) as a diagnostic that a theory is not actually predicting anything.
  • I4. Keep speaker commitment separate from shared common ground, so that asserting a proposition adds "the speaker believes it" rather than the bare fact for everyone.
  • I5. Run separate checks for conservative and non-conservative determiners, since "only" restricts its scope differently from "every" or "no".

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (frames): prag could compute presupposition checks for triggers like "know", "stop" or "again" from the truth-conditional skeleton of the frame tree, instead of keeping a hand-made table of how each connective projects.
  • I2 (world): when the text world is built sentence by sentence, a trigger in a later conjunct or clause can be checked against the states already added by earlier material, with an explainable trace of why it was satisfied.
  • I3 (learn): add negative controls in which conjunct order is swapped, for example "he knows he is incompetent and he is". A sound presupposition module should flag only the swapped version as a failure.
  • I4 (frames): speech-act handling in prag could record beliefs per participant, which would explain Moore-style oddness for "I" but not for "you" and would help irony and implicature detection.
  • I5 (answer): QA readers handling "only X did Y" questions over tales could draw the universal background inference about the whole domain, while avoiding the analysis used for "every".

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓New York UniversityNew York · United States201 works · 100,180 citations🔬Centre National de la Recherche ScientifiqueParis · France168 works · 62,369 citations🔬Institut Jean NicodParis · France11 works · 1,659 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 worksPhilosophy · 284 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Implicature · 138 works

Cite

Cite as Philippe Schlenker. 2009. Local Contexts. Semantics and Pragmatics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3765/sp.2.3

@article{schlenker2009local,
  title = {{Local Contexts}},
  author = {Philippe Schlenker},
  journal = {Semantics and Pragmatics},
  year = {2009},
  doi = {10.3765/sp.2.3},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.2.3}
}

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