Keywords

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This small monograph has covered some extensive ground, or so I hope. Grasping all the definitions, and implications, in one go may be difficult, but I hope the moral got through to the reader. The intuitions about natural language meaning advocated here are quite pragmatic. The drive is theoretical, formal, and is intended to display, or model, structural properties of interpretation. The techniques are very classical. I believe nothing in this whole monograph hinges upon more than (1) a Tarskian satisfaction relation, extended with a pragmatic use of witnesses, (2) a very modestly implemented notion of the dynamic composition of meanings, and (3) a belief in possibilities. No further philosophical or technical assumptions have been made to cover the linguistic data addressed, or so I think. The reader is seriously invited to nail me down on more assumptions.

The main results of this monograph can, thus, be seen as negative. In order to account for a whole lot of phenomena over which much ink has been spilled the last 25 years or so, we don’t need discourse representation structures, nor do we need to think of meanings as context change potentials, nor do we need a situation-based semantics—all tests are, or seem to be, negative. If I were your physician, you would be happy with such a result: no diseases, no cure, no pay. The situation in semantics is still a little bit different, though. I would be the last to claim that the so-called ‘diseases’ are evil. I believe it is, indeed, illuminating to work with discourse representation structures, and I believe that context change potentials do a wholesome job, and I am confident that situations of various kinds will flourish in any reasonably rich semantics, and I do think that a dynamic conception of meanings may be called for. However, dynamic semantics, can survive, and be fruitfully practiced, without any of these commitments.