Jeroen Groenendijk

Inquisitive Semantics: Two Possibilities for Disjunction

We introduce an inquisitive semantics for a language of propositional logic, where the interpretation of disjunction is the source of inquisitiveness. Indicative conditionals and conditional questions are treated on a par both syntactically and semantically. The semantics comes with a new logical-pragmatical notion which judges and compares the compliance of responses to an initiative in inquisitive dialogue.

Meaning in Motion

The paper sketches the place of dynamic semantics within a broader picture of developments in philosophical and linguistic theories of meaning. Some basic concepts of dynamic semantics are illustrated by means of a detailed analysis of anaphoric definite and indefinite descriptions, which are treated as contextually dependent quantificational expressions. It is shown how a dynamic view sheds new light on the contextual nature of interpretation, on the difference between monologue and dialogue, and on the interplay between direct and indirect information.

Inquisitive Semantics: A New Notion of Meaning

This paper presents a notion of meaning that captures both informative and inquisitive content, which forms the cornerstone of inquisitive semantics. The new notion of meaning is explained and motivated in detail, and compared to previous inquisitive notions of meaning.

Chapter 19 – Questions

Publisher Summary In common parlance, the term “question” is used in at least three different ways, which to avoid misunderstanding is distinguished terminologically in this chapter. First of all, the term is used to refer to a particular type of sentences characterized by word order, intonation, question mark, and the occurrence of interrogative pronouns. Such sentences are referred to by the term “interrogative sentences.” An approach that starts out from some strict postulates concerning interrogatives and answers is sketched in the chapter. The chapter considers whether, and if so how interrogatives can be added to the language of propositional logic. One of the results of this investigation establishes the essentially intentional nature of the notion of a question. The chapter considers the addition of interrogatives to the language of predicate logic and shows that the resulting analysis resembles the approach developed earlier in important respects. A description of some key data and empirical phenomena that any semantics of interrogatives has to cope with is included in the chapter, explaining how the various approaches are motivated by them.

Two theories of dynamic semantics

The dynamic view on the semantics of natural language, though stemming already from the seventies, has developed into a widely studied subject in the second half of the eighties. At present, the unification of various dynamic theories constitutes an important issue. In this paper, two theories are compared, viz. update semantics, and dynamic predicate logic. In section 1 a general characterization of the idea of a dynamic semantics for natural language is given which subsumes these two theories. Sections 2 and 3 are devoted to short expositions of each of them. In the final section 4 a comparison is made.

On the semantics and logic of declaratives and interrogatives

In many natural languages, there are clear syntactic and/or intonational differences between declarative sentences, which are primarily used to provide information, and interrogative sentences, which are primarily used to request information. Most logical frameworks restrict their attention to the former. Those that are concerned with both usually assume a logical language that makes a clear syntactic distinction between declaratives and interrogatives, and usually assign different types of semantic values to these two types of sentences. A different approach has been taken in recent work on inquisitive semantics. This approach does not take the basic syntactic distinction between declaratives and interrogatives as its starting point, but rather a new notion of meaning that captures both informative and inquisitive content in an integrated way. The standard way to treat the logical connectives in this approach is to associate them with the basic algebraic operations on these new types of meanings. For instance, conjunction and disjunction are treated as meet and join operators, just as in classical logic. This gives rise to a hybrid system, where sentences can be both informative and inquisitive at the same time, and there is no clearcut division between declaratives and interrogatives. It may seem that these two general approaches in the existing literature are quite incompatible. The main aim of this paper is to show that this is not the case. We develop an inquisitive semantics for a logical language that has a clearcut division between declaratives and interrogatives. We show that this language coincides in expressive power with the hybrid language that is standardly assumed in inquisitive semantics, we establish a sound and complete axiomatization for the associated logic, and we consider a natural enrichment of the system with presuppositional interrogatives.

A pragmatic analysis of specificity

This paper is mainly concerned with the analysis of some aspects of the specific/non-specific contrast. It also contains some remarks on the de dicto/de re ambiguity in belief contexts. The basic assumption underlying our analysis is that an adequate theory of meaning for a language should consist of (at least) a semantic theory and a pragmatic theory. A semantic theory we consider to be a theory of truth and a pragmatic theory a theory of correctness. One of the grounds for adopting this assumption is that there are aspects of the meaning of certain expressions and constructions which cannot be captured in terms of truth conditions, but which should be described in terms of the conditions under which these expressions and constructions can be used correctly.1 An important and interesting part of these conditions are those which concern the information of language users. That part of a pragmatic theory which deals with these conditions we call ‘epistemic pragmatics’.

Towards a logic of information exchange: an inquisitive witness semantics

Traditionally, the meaning of a sentence is identified with its truth conditions. This approach is driven by the age-old attention that philosophy has devoted to the study of argumentation. In terms of truth conditions one defines entailment, the crucial notion that rules the soundness of an argument: a sentence ϕ is said to entail another sentence ψ in case the truth conditions for ϕ are at least as stringent as the truth conditions for ψ.

Semantics, pragmatics and the theory of meaning

Abstract In this paper arguments are given for the thesis that an adequate theory of meaning for a natural language has to consist at least of a recursive specification of the truth conditions (semantics) and of a recursive specification of the correctness conditions (pragmatics) of the sentences of that language. The thesis is defended on both theoretical and empirical grounds. The empirical grounds are that such a theory of meaning makes it possible to explain a wide range of phenomena concerning the meaning of various kinds of linguistic expressions and constructions which cannot be explained in either syntactic or semantic terms. The theoretical grounds are that a theory of meaning which consists of both a semantics and a pragmatics seems a promising way to unify insights from two main streams of contemporary philosophy of language: logical semantics and speech act theory. Furthermore, some notions and principles of a formal pragmatic theory are discussed.

Information, issues, and attention

A sentence is informative if there are possible worlds that are eliminated from the common ground by each of the proposed updates, and it is inquisitive if it proposes two or more alternative updates, requesting information from other participants in order to establish at least one of these updates. This chapter argues that this notion of meaning has an additional advantage. It discusses a recapitulation of inquisitive semantics, and presents the definition of the semantics. The chapter shows how attentive content can be captured in a natural extension of this framework. It examines pragmatic aspects of the interpretation of sentences that are not merely informative, but also inquisitive and/or attentive. The chapter describes the behaviour of might in certain embedded contexts, and argues that the semantic meaning of might sentences is strengthened in a particular way before being composed with the semantic meaning of the embedding operator. Keywords: attentive content; epistemic modal operator; informative content; inquisitive semantics