Irene Heim (1982), Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst; published New York: Garland, 1988 (Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics), xi + 413 pp. — https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/Tk0ZmYyY/
Key takeaways
- Indefinites do not quantify. “A cat” contributes an open formula cat(xᵢ); its apparent force comes from the operator that binds it: always, usually, every (whose restrictor it sits in), a modal, or the unpronounced necessity operator of a bare conditional, or else existential closure. “Every man who owns a donkey beats it” is universal over man–donkey pairs, and “if a man owns a donkey he beats it” is necessity restricted by the if-clause, after Lewis on adverbs of quantification and Kratzer on modals (ch. II).
- Against the rivals. Geach-style binding gives truth conditions only to whole texts; Grice–Kripke–Lewis salience cannot explain why truth-conditionally equivalent sentences differ in what they let a later pronoun pick up (“I dropped ten marbles and found all of them, except for one. It is probably under the sofa” versus “…found only nine of them. It…”); Evans–Cooper–Parsons E-type pronouns predict uniqueness implications that conditionals refute (“If someone is in Athens, he is not in Rhodes”) (ch. I).
- Files. A file is a common ground with structure: a domain of card numbers and a set of satisfying sequences. Each logical form has a file change potential; conjunction is successive update, and quantifiers and negation work through tentative auxiliary files. A file is true if some sequence satisfies it, which is where existential force comes from, so existential closure and the indexing rules can be dropped from grammar (ch. III, §§1–4).
- Definiteness is familiarity. The Extended Novelty-Familiarity Condition: an indefinite’s index must be new to the file; a definite’s must be in it, with its descriptive content entailed. Deixis and anaphora are one phenomenon (both need a familiar card); definites that are novel are licensed by accommodation, which must “bridge” the new card to old ones, and which yields narrow-scope definites (“Every man hates his father”) and paycheck pronouns (ch. III, §5).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-09 at the owner’s request from the manuscript
bibliography of 2026-10-09 (work what-survives-translation), which
considered it and dropped it from the final reference list, as one of
the dynamic-semantics works (with Stalnaker, LIT-811, and Veltman,
LIT-818) the exchange named. See the curation entry of that day.
Read on 2026-10-09 (NOTE-608). With Veltman’s and Krifka’s
(LIT-835) readings of the same day it is a source of THEORY-162,
that what an utterance does to a context is part of its meaning and is
not fixed by its truth conditions. linguistics is primary: it is a
theory of English noun phrases argued from grammatical judgements;
philosophy-of-language holds the account of reference, anaphora and
the common ground; logic holds the file change semantics. Chapter III
reads Stalnaker’s “Assertion” closely and quotes its account of the
common ground and of assertion’s essential effect, so it is also where
this record has read that essay’s words.