File change semantics and the familiarity theory definiteness

Formal Semantics and Anaphora, Lecture 5 Formal Semantics and Anaphora, Lecture 5

Barbara H. Partee, HSE, Feb 19, 2014 Barbara H. Partee, HSE, Feb 19, 2014

Anaphora as a phenomenon refers to the relationship between a “referentially dependent” expression (the anaphoric expression, or anaphor) and a “referentially independent” expression that serves as its antecedent and from which the anaphoric expression gets its reference (or other semantic value). Examples:

(1) a. John left because he was tired. Pronominal anaphora; antecedent a DP.

To determine semantic value of an anaphoric expression such as he, so, such, or anaphoric ∅ (as in (1b)), we need to know what its antecedent is, and we need to know the semantic rules that determine the value of the anaphor in terms of the value of its antecedent. In a simple case like John and he in (1a), the antecedent refers to an individual, and the pronoun refers to the same individual. The examples in (1b-d) show that anaphora is not always a relation between individual-denoting expressions, and example (1e) shows that even with pronominal anaphora, the anaphoric relation is not always a relation of “coreference”, as it seems to be in (1a).

The study of anaphora involves both syntax and semantics. We need syntax to describe the distribution of anaphoric expressions and their antecedents, and we need semantics to describe how the semantic value of an anaphoric expression is determined. And as we progress, we will find ourselves needing to bring pragmatics into the picture

(3) a. If you can find it, I would recommend buying the 1977 Vishnevskaya recording.

b. As we have __ in the past, WFCR will continue to bring you the finest music.

b. Vanjaljubit sebja.

c. Oni čitali žaloby drug na druga. (Testelets 2001, p.602)

1 There are a pair of rare terms that are useful here: endophora for the case where a referentially dependent sentence gets its value from a linguistic expression within the same text, and exophora for a case like that in (2) where it gets its value from outside the linguistic context. But those terms are very rarely used. 2 Node A c-commands node B in a constituent structure tree if the first branching node that dominates A

Barbara H. Partee, HSE, Feb 19, 2014 Barbara H. Partee, HSE, Feb 19, 2014

One possibility: Coreference
When the antecedent is a proper name, as in (1a) and (4a), a natural first hypothesis is that the relation is one of coreference: the antecedent is an e-type expression that denotes (refers to) an individual, and the pronoun “picks up the reference of” its antecedent.

Does that mean that we need two different interpretation rules for pronouns? Partee (1978) argued:

Montague (1973): All pronouns treated as bound variables.

Sentence (5) has one obvious ambiguity – “his” can mean “John’s”, or it can have a referent outside the sentence – someone else that we have been talking about, for instance Max. Such an ambiguity is sometimes notated as follows:

(5) Johni loves hisi/j wife. (I.e. his can have the same “referential index” as John or a different one.)

There has been even more work on the syntax of anaphora than on its semantics, because the syntactic distribution of various anaphoric expressions has raised challenges that have played a major role in various developments in syntactic theory, most famously but not

A central syntactic question is how to best describe and explain the differences in distribution between “plain pronouns” like he, she, it (called pronominals, or pronouns, in Chomskian Binding Theory) and reflexive pronouns himself, herself, itself (anaphors in Chomskian Binding Theory), and similar forms in other languages. Reinhart and Chomsky are two of the classic names in this endeavor; Chomsky is more prominent among syntacticians, while semanticists especially appreciate Reinhart for her equal attention to syntactic and semantic aspects of the problem. Reinhart (1999) begins as follows (I’ve changed the example number):

Binding theory is the branch of linguistic theory that explains the behavior of sentence-internal anaphora, which is labelled 'bound anaphora' …. To illustrate

(9) a. Lucie thought that Lili hurt her.
b. Lucie thought that Lili hurt herself.
c. *Lucie thought that herself hurt Lili.

for English anaphors, a crucial factor for local domains is the notion of “accessible subject”, which includes subjects of both finite and infinitive clauses, while for Russian reflexives, what is crucial is the domain of a finite subject, and for the distribution of Russian reciprocal drug druga (also an anaphor), the domain of any subject, including e.g. dative agents, is a local domain. This explains, among other things, the difference between the English examples (14a-b) and the Russian examples (15a-b).

Binding Theory, especially on Reinhart’s account, is concerned primarily with the distribution of reflexive pronouns like herself, but is also concerned with the differences between the distributions of pronominals and of reflexive pronouns.

b. Onii poprosili žurnalistovj [PROj napisat’ o sebei/j stat’ju]

Typology of pronouns and anaphors is a big area of research, and we will return to it.

An excellent book on Binding Theory with a well-balanced syntax-and-semantics perspective is (Büring 2004). I have one chapter online now, and will add more (with the links included in the Links to Readings document). And (Testelets 2001) has a good introduction to the syntax of Binding Theory, with challenges from Slavic languages.

Typological issues. English vs. Russian. Testelets (2001, pp. 600-603) discusses work of Rappaport (1986), who argued that a difference between English and Russian is that

Barbara H. Partee, HSE, Feb 19, 2014 Barbara H. Partee, HSE, Feb 19, 2014

“Anti-reflexives”. Saxon (1984) discusses the phenomenon of “disjoint anaphora” in Dogrib, an indigenous language of western Canada. “Disjoint anaphors” are expressions whose syntactic distribution is constrained in the same way as typical anaphors, but their interpretation is not “identical to the antecedent” in the way that a reflexive is, but rather they denote some salient individual necessarily different from the “antecedent” (which typically means “different from the subject”.) This work is particularly interesting in how it helps to distinguish the syntactic notion of “anaphor subject to Principle A” from the semantic notion of “reflexive”. The treatment of full-DP reflexives in Polish and Russian actually resembles the treatment of disjoint anaphors in Dogrib. But the details will have to wait until we discuss reflexives later in the semester.

4. Definite DPs as anaphoric expressions: debates

Another issue in the discussion of anaphora is the semantics of definite DPs like the king, the chair. We have discussed so far only one family of views of the semantics of definites, that on which a definite noun phrase asserts or presupposes that one and only one entity satisfies the given description. This family of views may be called the
uniqueness theory of definites. There is another theory, called the familiarity theory of definites. This theory finds support in examples like (19) below, which don’t seem to

Lecture 6. Feb 26. Pronouns and reflexives, syntax and semantics. Readings to be assigned: Chomsky, Reinhart, Bach&Partee, Büring, others.

Lecture 9. March 19. Pronouns and reflexives 2: typological issues. Readings to be assigned. Büring, Reinhart, Testelets, Lubowicz, Pollard and Sag, others.

Heim's theory in its "Logical Form" version, and Kamp's Discourse Representation Theory. Definite DPs as anaphoric expressions. Parallels between anaphora and
presupposition. Readings to include (1) Heim’s dissertation, available as a djvu file or as a very large PDF file; (2) (Kamp 1981), (3) (Heim 1983b) File change semantics and the familiarity theory of definiteness. (4) (Lewis 1979) Scorekeeping in a language game. (5) (Stalnaker 1978). Assertion. (6)(Heim 1983a). On the projection problem for
presuppositions.; (7) (Elbourne 2005)

Lecture 11: Binding implicit variables in quantified contexts. Similarities and differences between ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’ anaphora. Debates about "null" pronouns and their typology. (Condoravdi and Gawron 1996, Partee 1989).

Alternative to homework #4-5-6: Look at issues of pronouns and reflexives in Russian and/or in other language(s) that you know, and prepare to give a very presentation in class (to be scheduled sometime in May), with a short handout, followed by a short paper to be posted online. If you choose this alternative, “Homework 4” will be to write a project proposal with some references (I can try to help with references). “Homework 5” will be a class presentation with handout. “Homework 6” will be a short paper, which I will post online on the class website. I taught a similarly themed course at RGGU in 2008, and you can see what the students chose to give presentations about here:
http://people.umass.edu/partee/RGGU_2008/RGGU08_formal_semantics.htm .

Heim, Irene. 1983b. File change semantics and the familiarity theory of definiteness. In Meaning, Use and the Interpretation of Language, 164-190. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Reprinted in Portner and Partee, eds., 2002, 223-248. Reprinted in Portner and Partee, eds., 2002, 223-248 http://newstar.rinet.ru/~goga/biblio/essential-readings/09-Heim-
File.Change.Semantics.and.the.Familiarity.Theory.of.Definiteness.djvu.

Janssen and M.B.J. Stokhof, 277-322. Amsterdam: Mathematical Centre. Reprinted in: Jeroen Groenendijk, Theo Janssen, and Martin Stokhof (eds.), 1984, Truth, Interpretation, Information, GRASS 2, Dordrecht: Foris, pp. 1-41. Reprinted in Portner and Partee, eds., 2002, 189-222 http://newstar.rinet.ru/~goga/biblio/essential-readings/08-Kamp-
A.Theory.of.Truth.and.Semantic.Representation.djvu.

Kapitonov, Ivan. 2007. Two views of Russian reflexives. Ms. Moscow.

Büring, Daniel. 2004. Binding Theory: Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 4:
https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/partee/Semantics_Readings/BuringCh4.pdf
Carlson, Gregory. 2006. Anaphora. In Wiley Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science.

https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/partee/Semantics_Readings/Carlson2006anaphora.pdf.

Elbourne, Paul. 2005. Situations and Individuals. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Grodzinsky, Yosef, and Reinhart, Tanya. 1993. The Innateness of Binding and Coreference.

Wescoat, 114-125: Stanford University. Reprinted in Portner and Partee, eds., 2002, 249-260 http://newstar.rinet.ru/~goga/biblio/essential-readings/10-Heim-
On.the.Projection.Problem.for.Presuppositions.djvu.

Underground, ed. J. McCawley, 363-385. New York: Academic Press. In Semantics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics. Javeier Gutiérrez-Rexach (ed.), Vol. III, pages 20-39. Routledge, 2003. Also in Syntax and Semantics 7: Notes from the Linguistic Underground, 363-85, J. D.

http://www.stanford.edu/~kiparsky/Papers/anaph.hierarchies-t.pdf
Lewis, David. 1979. Scorekeeping in a language game. In Semantics from Different Points of View, eds. Rainer Bäuerle, Urs Egli and Arnim von Stechow. Berlin: Springer Verlag. Also in: Journal of Philosophical Logic 8.1, 1979, 339-359. Reprinted in David Lewis,
Philosophical Papers: Volume I, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 233-249. Reprinted in Portner and Partee, eds., 2002, 162-177 http://newstar.rinet.ru/~goga/biblio/essential- readings/06-Lewis-Scorekeeping.in.a.Language.Game.djvu
Lubowicz, Anna. 1999. Two views of Polish reflexives. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL XVIII), eds. Sonya Bird, Andrew Carnie, Jason D. Haugen and Peter Norquest, 337-350. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~lubowicz/docs/WCCFL18.pdf.

Reprinted in Partee, Barbara H. 2004. Compositionality in Formal Semantics: Selected
Papers by Barbara H. Partee. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 259-281
https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/partee/Partee89_BindingImplicitVar.pdf.

Partee, Barbara H. 1978. Bound variables and other anaphors. In Theoretical Issues In Natural
Language Processing 2 (TINLAP-2), ed. David L. Waltz, 79-85. Urbana, IL: University of
Illinois. Reprinted in Partee, Barbara H. 2004. Compositionality in Formal Semantics:
Selected Papers by Barbara H. Partee. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 110-121
https://udrive.oit.umass.edu/partee/Partee78TINLAP.pdf
Partee, Barbara H., and Bach, Emmon. 1981. Quantification, pronouns and VP anaphora. In
Formal Methods in the Study of Language, eds. J. Groenendijk, T. Janssen and M. Stokhof,
445-481. Amsterdam: Mathematisch Centrum. Reprinted in J.Groenendijk, T.Janssen, and
M.Stokhof, eds., Truth, Information and Interpretation: Selected Papers from the Third
Amsterdam Colloquium, Dordrecht: Foris, 99-130.

Reinhart, Tanya. 1983b. Coreference and bound anaphora: A restatement of the anaphora
question. Linguistics and Philosophy 6:47-88.

Reinhart, Tanya. 1999. Binding theory. In The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, eds.
Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil, 86-88. Cambridge Mass MIT Press.

Schwarz, Florian. 2009. Two Types of Definites in Natural Language, Linguistics Department,
University of Massachusetts Amherst: Ph.D. dissertation.

http://florianschwarz.net/FSDiss/FS-Diss_gradschoolformat.pdf or
http://florianschwarz.net/FSDiss/FSDiss.html.