Dynamics in Context Shift

Yoshiki Mori (Tsukuba University) and Ken-ichiro Shirai (Chukyo University)

Dynamism has been in focus since long in semantics. At the interface of semantics and pragmatics, DRT, Dynamic Semantics and others have all tried to observe and analyze what effect is imposed on the semantic interpretation from the context at a given point of “language flow”. On this stage of dynamic move, since the syntactic construction is considered to remain uncontaminated on whose ground a semantic construal should be dynamically constructed, the context will be changed by language, but not the other way around.

By the advent of Dynamic Syntax, however, the syntax is modeled strictly from left to right to find a calculus for a semantic interpretation of utterance. The syntax is underspecified in this sense on the way of analysis. Moreover, the DS syntax is not conceived as that of the representation, but as that of the semantic calculation. This means not only that the context will be changed and specified in the course of the tree building process, but also that the interpretation process based on the tree growth process will be changed dependently on context shift, too. The Dynamic Syntax perspective can contribute to lighting up more or less direct influence of contexts on grammar constructions.

In our talk we follow this doctrine to show how the interaction of contexts and tree growth processes diverge according to typological traits of natural languages. As we show in Shirai, Mori & Yamazoe (2004), besides the DS some kind of context theory is needed to capture the phenomena and theorize descriptions in this field. For this purpose, Schlenker’s (2004) context theory, provided with two different sorts of contexts, was chosen. This time we will amplify it in a principled way, trying to make the theory a little more clear-cut and capture more phenomena in the domain of temporal and other anaphoric and deictic domains at the same time.