Disjunction in a predictive theory of anaphora
Patrick D. Elliott
October 2022 

In this paper I develop a dynamic semantics for a first-order fragment, which incorporates insights from work on anaphora in logic, and the trivalent approach to presupposition projection. The resulting system - EDS - has interesting features which set it apart, both conceptually and empirically, from earlier iterations of dynamic semantics. Conceptually, the meanings of the logical connectives are derived by systematically generalizing the Strong Kleene connectives into a dynamic setting - the system is thereby predictive, drawing a tight connection between the logic of presupposition projection and patterns of anaphoric accessibility. On the empirical side, EDS diverges sharply from earlier proposals. In this paper, I focus mainly on disjunction, arguing that EDS provides a simple and elegant account of the dynamics of disjunction, including traditionally problematic cases such as Partee disjunctions and program disjunctions.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006657 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	To appear in the proceedings of TLLM 2022
keywords:	disjunction, anaphora, dynamic semantics, presupposition, logic, semantics
previous versions:	v1 [June 2022]
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