Introductory notes on dynamic semantics ⇤

This thesis breaks with a long semantic tradition—going back at least to Frege, and running through Montague, Davidson, Lewis and beyond—which revolves around the individual sentence, articulating the meaning of all linguistic expressions in terms of their contributions to the truth-conditions of the sentences in which they occur. By shifting the locus of truth-conditions in systematic theorizing to the discourse, discourse primacy shifts the center of gravity in semantics. It recommends that we articulate the meaning of a sentence in terms of its potential to contribute to the truth-conditions, or informational content, of discourses in which it can occur. This idea was first developed by Kamp [1981] and (independently) by Heim [1982], in works that formed the starting point for subsequent theorizing in the dynamic tradition. Exactly how to model a discourse is itself a theoretical question on which theorists working in the spirit of discourse primacy may di↵er. But a common theme in the dynamic tradition is to model a discourse via aspects of the mental states of the agents in conversation. For instance, Kamp [1981] models a discourse via a certain kind of a structured representation (a discourse representation structure, or DRS), which (he postulates) is an abstract model of the kind of mental representation involved in linguistic processing and understanding. On his picture, it is fundamentally these structures that have truth-conditions. And in Heim [1982], the fundamental bearers of truth-conditions are the coordinated states of presupposition of the participants of the conversation. It is the content of these states that the meanings of sentences operate upon.