Coreference and Contextually Restricted Quantification

The aim of this paper is to argue that update semantics is a natural framework for contextually restricted quantification, and to illustrate its use in the analysis of anaphoric definite descriptions and certain other anaphoric terms. The present discussion remains at an informal level, but takes place against the background of the system of update semantics for the language of modal predicate logic as presented in Groenendijk et al. 1995a; Groenendijk et al. 1995c. The theoretical notions that are used rather casually in the present paper are intended to be in accordance with the formal ones defined in those earlier papers. As for the additions to the system particular to the paper at hand, their formal rendering has to be deferred to another occasion. On the descriptive level, the paper focusses on (singular) anaphoric definite descriptions. The suggestion made here, is to treat them—together with certain other anaphoric terms—as quantifiers, where quantification is dynamic and contextually restricted. We share the philosophy of Neale 1993 and Ludlow and Neale 1991, who defend a uniform Russellian, i.e., a quantificational analysis of the semantics of definites and indefinites, explaining apparent non-quantificational aspects in (epistemic) pragmatic terms. Our contribution to this stock of ideas, is to look upon quantification as being of a dynamic nature—in order to account for binding relations across the syntactic scope of quantifiers—, and, when suitable, restricted to context sets—in order to make sense of the uniqueness preconditions of anaphoric definite descriptions, and the preconditions of other kinds of anaphoric terms.1 The point of view that (anaphoric) definite descriptions involve context dependent quantification is not new, of course. We hope to show, though, that