Dynamic theories of meaning

General data

Course ID:	3501-M48-10-OG
Erasmus code / ISCED:	08.1 Kod klasyfikacyjny przedmiotu składa się z trzech do pięciu cyfr, przy czym trzy pierwsze oznaczają klasyfikację dziedziny wg. Listy kodów dziedzin obowiązującej w programie Socrates/Erasmus, czwarta (dotąd na ogół 0) – ewentualne uszczegółowienie informacji o dyscyplinie, piąta – stopień zaawansowania przedmiotu ustalony na podstawie roku studiów, dla którego przedmiot jest przeznaczony. / (0223) Philosophy and ethics The ISCED (International Standard Classification of Education) code has been designed by UNESCO.
Course title:	Dynamic theories of meaning
Name in Polish:	Dynamiczne teorie znaczenia
Organizational unit:	Institute of Philosophy
Course groups:	General university courses General university courses in the humanities
ECTS credit allocation (and other scores):	(not available) Basic information on ECTS credits allocation principles: the annual hourly workload of the student’s work required to achieve the expected learning outcomes for a given stage is 1500-1800h, corresponding to 60 ECTS; the student’s weekly hourly workload is 45 h; 1 ECTS point corresponds to 25-30 hours of student work needed to achieve the assumed learning outcomes; weekly student workload necessary to achieve the assumed learning outcomes allows to obtain 1.5 ECTS; work required to pass the course, which has been assigned 3 ECTS, constitutes 10% of the semester student load. view allocation of credits
Language:	Polish
Type of course:	elective monographs
Prerequisites (description):	Propositional logic, predicate logic, semantics of first-order logic (satisfaction relation and truth in a model).
Mode:	Classroom
Short description:	This lecture introduces to dynamic semantics. Dynamic semantics is an approach to meaning that was developed in the early eighties by Kamp (Discourse Representation Theory) and Heim (File Change Semantics), and was carried on by many others, most notably Groenendijk and Stokhof (Dynamic Predicate Logic). The goal of this lecture is to introduce students to systems of dynamic semantics: Groenendijk and Stokhof’s Dynamic Predicate Logic (DPL 1991), van den Berg’s Dynamic Plural Logic (DPlL 1996), Muskens' Dynamic Type Logic (DL 1996). We will discuss in depth the linguistically important technical innovations introduced by each of these systems, as well as their mutual relations.
Full description:	Dynamic semantics embodies a new view of meaning, departing from the static (truth-conditional) paradigm conceived by Tarski. The scope of dynamic semantics is not the interpretation of sentences in isolation, but the interpretation of texts (fragments of discourse). The emphasis is not on the concept of truth with respect to appropriate models, but on the context-change potential of linguistic expressions. The core idea of the dynamic semantics is that the meaning of a sentence does not lie in its truth conditions, but rather in the way it changes the context; a sentence is interpreted as a relation between an input context and an output one. The list of topics will include: 1. Singular anaphora (a) Static approach: Predicate Logic, E-type Interpretation (b) Dynamic approach: Kamp and Reyle's Discourse Representation Theory (DRT 1993) (c) Dynamic approach: Groenendijk and Stokhof’s Dynamic Predicate Logic (DPL 1991). 2. Plural anaphora (a) Static Plural Logic (b) Dynamic approach: Kamp and Reyle's DRT (c) Dynamic approach: Van den Berg’s Dynamic Plural Logic (DPlL 1996). 3. Compositionality (a) Static Type Logic (b) Dynamic approach: Muskens' Dynamic Type Logic (DL 1996) (c) Dynamic approach: Bittner's Update with Centering (UC).
Bibliography:	1. Bittner, M. Temporality: Universals and Variation, book in preparation. 2. Groenendijk, J., M. Stokhof. 1991. “Dynamic Predicate Logic”, Linguistics and Philosophy 14(1), 39–100. 3. Kamp, H.: 1981. “A theory of truth and semantic representation”. [W:] J. Groenendijk, T. Janssen i M. Stokhof (red.), Truth, Interpretation and Information, Dordrecht: Foris, 1–41. 4. Kamp, H., Reyle, U. 1993. From Discourse to Logic, Dordrecht: Kluwer. 5. Karttunen, L. 1971. “Discourse Referents”, Technical report, RAND Corporation, Reproduced by the Indiana University Linguistics Club. 6. Muskens, R. 1996. “Combining Montague semantics and discourse representation”, Linguistics and Philosophy 19(2), 143–186. 7. Van den Berg, M. H. 1996. The Internal Structure of Discourse, Ph.D. thesis, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam.
Learning outcomes:	By the end of this lecture students will be able to use Dynamic Predicate Logic, Dynamic Plural Logic and Dynamic Type Logic to represent a fragment of natural language discourse.
Assessment methods and assessment criteria:	Attendance and class participation, homework assignments.

This course is not currently offered.

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