A Presuppositional Analysis Of Specific Indefinites: Common Grounds As Structured Information States (outstanding Dissertations In Linguistics)

First published in 1998. In this book the author presents the view that although many linguists have been interested in specific indefinites, their theories are not quite satisfactory in that they have only tried to explore some aspects of specific indefinites. This paper assumes a standard notion of specificity, i.e., the notion of someone having-in-mind an individual or a relation. Under this assumption, there is an attempt to review previous studies on specific indefinites, and propose a new theory of specificity which I believe can capture all aspects which the previous studies have explored. This leads us to a new information theory which is partially representational and partially denotational., and which is useful for dealing with conversational aspects, like the distinction between the speaker and the audience. A specific indefinite presupposes that someone has in mind an individual who has the property denoted by its descriptive content. Having an individual inmind means that the agent knows who the referent is. This affects the information state of the agent, but not the others. The asymmetric information, shared by all conversational participants, requires a common ground to have multiple information states, each for each participant. The information state of the agent who has an individual in mind must be structured into sub-information-states so that each sub-information-state associates the specific indefinite with a different unique individual. It then conveys the information that the agent has some individual in mind, but that it is not known yet who it is. This analysis thus requires a new dynamic semantics which is partially representational and partially denotational. Specific indefinites tend to have widest scope, which is explained by claiming that specific indefinites trigger presuppositions. Presuppositions are assumed to have various scopes with respect to operators in a sentence, and the strongest reading is preferred on rational and economic basis. Stronger readings roughly correspond to wider scopes. This book will be of interest to scholars who work on indefinite NPs, presuppositions, anaphora in belief contexts, and dynamic semantics in general. Ch. 1. Introduction -- ch. 2. Review of previous studies -- ch. 3. An ambiguity view of specificity -- ch. 4. Semantics of cognitive contact in information theory -- ch. 5. Presupposition projection and scope of specific indefinites. First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.