[PLing] Abstract zum Vortrag von Jan Köpping

[Viola Schmitt]

Liebe Kolleginnen & Kollegen,

hier nun das Abstract zum Vortrag von Jan Köpping (s.u.), zu dem wir Sie
an dieser Stelle noch einmal ganz herzlich einladen möchten.

Der Vortrag findet am Donnerstag, den 22.1.2015, um 18.30 im Hörsaal 16
des Hauptgebäudes statt.

Herzliche Grüße,

Viola Schmitt (auch im Namen von Katharina Hartmann und Jakob Steixner)


Varieties of Dependencies

The truth value of a sentence depends on what the facts are. This
observation about a certain kind of dependency usually lies at the core of
semantic theories. How this is spelled out in detail mostly depends on the
particular phenomena a semantic theory seeks to explain. Sometimes, the
world at which the sentence is evaluated is taken to be enough to model
this dependency; in other cases, more elaborated entities likes sequences
of worlds, times and places, indices for short, are taken into account.
Sometimes, semantic values other than extensions, namely their intensions
or contents, are analyzed as being dependent on the circumstances in which
they are uttered. Characterizations like these are known as (Kaplanian)
context theory.

In recent years, some syntactic and semantic accounts of anaphoric and
bound pronouns developed a mechanism that explains pronoun resolution in
terms of another kind of dependency. The truth values of sentences
containing pronouns are said to be dependent on sequences of individuals
which are built up in a systematic way from the discourse the sentences in
question are uttered in. Immediately, the question arises whether this
discourse dependency can be subsumed under context or index dependency or
whether it happens to be a dependency of a third kind. The present talk
tries to find an answer to this question.