What's at Stack in Discourse

Abstract

This is a paper on modal subordination. I present the idea as an extension of the dynamic logic found in Groenenkijk, Stokhof and Veltman 1996 [2], henceforth referred to as GSV. An information state is a set of possibilities i ∈ I, where a possibility is a pair of a referent system and a possible world. A referent system is a two-step assignment function: Variables point to pegs, unique persistent objects which in turn are assigned to objects in the domain of individuals. This setup makes it possible to keep the number of variables that are active at any point in discourse small: A newly introduced discourse referent is associated with a fresh peg, while the variable referring to that peg may be reassigned ¿from its previous use. The details of the system are laid out in [2, 185-195]. The definition of support, through some intermediate notions, states that a state s supports a proposition iff the state sø] exists and contains descendants of all possibilities in s. A descendant i of a possibility i preserves the possible world of i, and its referent system differs from that of i at most in the introduction of new pegs and the assignment of variables to them.