Witnesses and Existential Disclosure

Nigel Flower, NYU

Abstract

Cross sentential anaphora and the scope-taking behavior of indefinites more generally provide a challenge to static theories of semantics that don't pay attention to the way that indefinites behave. Namely, indefinites seem to have effects on sentential meanings over and above their behavior as existential quantifiers; they can license anaphora in a cross-sentential context, provided that they do not find themselves within the scope of a subset of operators.

  1. A man_i walked in. He_i sat down.
  2. John didn't buy a car_i. *It_i was red.

Traditionally, semanticists have drawn from the toolbox provided by Dynamic Semantics to solve these problems and have created a host of theoretical machinery to describe how certain scopal operators such as negation can constrain the effects that these indefinites bring about, but they are not without their problems (indefinites under the scope of double negation, "Partee pairs," etc.). I will attempt to provide a static account of one such tool in the literature called Existential Disclosure, and I will explore the ways that this static reformulation might be employed to instances of dynamic intervention effects shown in Dutch.