UnboundAnaphoricPronounsE-Type,Dynamic,and.doc

to appear in Synthese Unbound Anaphoric Pronouns: E-Type, Dynamic, and Structured Propositions Approaches Friederike Moltmann Department of Philosophy Stirling University fm15@stir.ac.uk Unbound anaphoric pronouns, as in (1a-b), relate to an indefinite noun phrase as linguistic antecedent, but are not in a position to naturally act as a variable bound by the antecedent:1 (1) a. Someone broke in. He stole the silver. b. If someone breaks in, he will steal the silver. c. Someone might break in. He might steal the silver. On any reasonable logical analysis of the sentences in (1) (respecting minimal syntactic conditions), someone cannot be analysed as an existential quantifier binding the variable that he may stand for. Unbound anaphoric pronouns have presented major challenges to semantic theory, giving rise to new developments of dynamic semantic approaches, which imply a major revision of the notion of sentence meaning in the traditional sense. A sentence on the dynamic semantic view does not express an independent proposition, but rather serves to change the previous information state in certain ways so that it will be only the entire discourse that will have truth conditions. There is an alternative to the dynamic semantic approach which is theoretically much less involving and is in fact entirely compatible with any traditional view of sentence meaning. This is what, following Evans (1985), is called the E-type approach to unbound anaphoric pronouns. The E-type approach, essentially, aims at reducing the problem of the semantic relationship between antecedent and unbound anaphoric pronoun to that of replacing the pronoun by a full NP whose semantics is taken to be well-known. The pronoun then is not interpreted directly, but rather first replaced by a nonpronominal NP whose content is retrieved from the previous discourse context (generally a definite description). The dynamic semantic approach takes unbound anaphoric pronouns to b