Bounded Meaning

Bounded Meaning develops a new theory of how and why semantic interpretation depends not just on global information, but also on local information. Mandelkern provides criticisms of the dominant theory, dynamic semantics, and proposes a new theory of bounds as limits on admissible interpretations of an expression.

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Bounded Meaninginvestigates the dynamics of interpretation:how and why the interpretation of the building blocks of human language is sensitive, notjust to the context in which an expression is used, but also to the expression's linguisticenvironment. Matthew Mandelkern motivates a range of generalizations about the dynamicsof interpretation involving modals, conditionals, and anaphora, and provides an overview ofthe best extant theory of those patterns, namely, dynamic semantics. After bringing out thestriking motivations and successes of that framework, the discussion turns to criticisms ofdynamic semantics, focusing on its puzzling predictions about the logic of natural language.In response to these problems, Mandelkern develops a novel framework for explainingdynamic phenomena without dynamic semantics: the bounded theory of meaning. On thebounded theory, dynamic phenomena arise from the interaction of two dimensions ofmeaning. One dimension is a standard truth-conditional layer, which, relative to a context ofuse, associates each sentence with a proposition. The second dimension, the dimension ofbounds, limits the admissible interpretations of an expression, relative to the expression'scontext of use and its local information. Bounds thus play an essential role in coordinatingon the resolution of context-sensitive language, explaining dynamic effects in naturallanguage while avoiding a variety of problematic predictions of dynamic semantics.