UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation provides a commitment-based account of discourse-polarity and anaphoric polarity-sensitivity by appealing to veridicality distinctions.

It investigates the interaction of anaphora and negation, addressing the overarching question of how human language users combine information from multiple sources into an integrated representation of language meaning. Because the interpretation of anaphora systematically depends on the discourse context, studying its interaction with the local utterance context addresses this overarching question.

The work provides arguments and evidence for theoretically understanding the constraints that negation places on anaphora in terms of speaker commitments and veridicality. Anaphoric accessibility is sensitive to negation because it is sensitive to the veridicality of the embedding context(s) of an anaphor and its antecedent.

On these terms, a formal semantic account of the interaction of anaphora and negation is developed. It is an intensional dynamic account based on Compositional DRT and flat-update systems, where negation and other non-veridical operators are treated as externally dynamic. I argue that we need to conceptualize discourse referents as an intensional and epistemic representation to capture the relevant interactions.

This provides a unified account of several related issues that have received disparate analyses in the previous literature: anaphora to indefinites under negation (double-negation, bathroom-disjunctions, discourse subordination, and cross-speaker cases), the interaction of propositional anaphora and negation, polarity-sensitive negativity-tags, and the question what counts as a negative sentence/utterance for the purposes of anaphora in discourse.