Demonstratives in Discourse

There are two influential theories that deal with the role of the context in determining the meaning of sentences: Kaplan's logic of demonstratives and Kamp's discourse representation theory. How Kaplan would deal with the donkey sentences must remain a matter of speculation, but there is an obvious and reasonable answer to the question of how demonstratives should be handled within discourse representation theory. The latter question is addressed in the first part of this paper. The account proposed here makes demonstratives and indexicals a special case of the treatment of definite NPs in terms of presupposition, like the account of names in Geurts (1997) or treatments of definite descriptions like Van der Sandt (1992), Asher & Lascarides (1998) and others. The treatment turns out to be rather different from Kaplan's account of demonstratives and indexicals in that it appears to lack direct referentiality and in that direct referentiality does not entail rigid designation. These problems have been noted before by Kamp and have led to his controversial introduction of external anchors. This paper develops the notion of intensional anchors as an alternative and shows that they - for normal indexicals and demonstratives - allow a proper reconstruction of Kaplan's theory that avoids the problems which come with external anchors. Additional evidence for intensional anchors is provided by an application to the problems of intentional identity discussed by Edelberg.