Local Contexts Presuppositions , Dynamic Semantics and Transparency

The dynamic approach posits that a presupposition must be satisfied in its local context. But how is a local context derived from the global one? Extant dynamic analyses must specify in the lexical entry of any operator what its ‘context change potential’ is, and for this very reason they fail to be explanatory. To circumvent the problem, we revise two assumptions of the dynamic approach: we take the update process to be derivative from a classical, non-dynamic semantics which obviates the need for dynamic lexical entries; and we deny that a local context encodes what the speech act participants ‘take for granted’. Instead, we take the local context of an expression E in a sentence S to be the smallest domain that one may restrict attention to when assessing E without jeopardizing the truth conditions of S. Local contexts may be computed incrementally or symmetrically: in the incremental case, only information about the expressions that precede E is taken into account; in the symmetric case, all of S (except E) is accessed. The resulting account of local satisfaction is shown to be equivalent to the ‘Transparency theory’ of presuppositions (Schlenker 2007a,b), whose incremental version is nearly equivalent to Heim’s dynamic semantics. But unlike the Transparency theory, the present account makes it possible to compute in great generality the semantic contribution of an expression in its local context and thus to offer a general theory of triviality, and possibly of presupposition generation. This account can thus be seen as a synthesis between the Transparency theory and dynamic semantics.