DEVRIES TO DEFEND DISSERTATION

Karl DeVries will defend his dissertation entitled “Independence Friendly Dynamic Semantics: Integrating Exceptional Scope, Anaphora and their Interactions” on Thursday, September 29 at 5pm in HUM 1 – Room 210.

Abstract:

The goal of this dissertation is to provide a semantic account for exceptional scope indefinites in terms of independence friendly reasoning. I take the view that an indefinite takes exceptional scope when its witness is required not to vary with the value of a variable introduced by a syntactically higher quantifier. This dissertation shows that a straightforward implementation of this view in a static logic results in a system that assigns truth conditions to sentences containing wide scope indefinites that are too strong. I show, surprisingly, that a better implementation of this intuition requires dynamic logic. While using a dynamic logic is a necessary ingredient in the analysis of wide scope indefinites in terms of independence, it is not a sufficient one. I survey a number of recent dynamic systems, examine possible definitions of maximization, and show that only some of these permit the proposed analysis of wide scope indefinites. I show that a system of dynamic plural logic (DPlL) with unselective maximization can be modified to fully account for wide scope indefinites in terms of independent witness choice.