On first order information exchange
Peter Dekker · 1997
this paper lies with the felicitous exchange of first order information. We are concerned with the question what licenses a speaker to convey open propositions or to utter sentences with pronouns. Although Grice's maxims of quality seem to give an appropriate answer to the question what licenses the felicitous exchange of propositional information, and although first order notions of truth and support have been developed within theories of discourse representation and dynamic interpretation, the question about first order licensing has to our opinion remained unanswered sofar. In the course of this paper we argue for a specific formal notion of licensing which satisfies some intuitively plausible principles concerning first order information exchange. According to the view exposed in this paper, speakers may convey information about subjects which have been introduced in a discourse only if these correspond to subjects they themselves have information about. It makes no substantial difference if these subjects have been introduced in the discourse by the speakers themselves or by other agents. We will argue that indeed the last type of phenomenon, which has become known as "cross-speaker anaphora", is not structurally different from the phenomenon of ordinary, single speaker, anaphora. The main and rather trivial difference between single and cross-speaker anaphora resides in the fact that one agent may simply fail to have information about (the identity of) subjects introduced by other agents. Failing such information, it would clearly be inappropriate for him to exchange information about them. We will proceed as follows. In section 2 we will critically discuss two preliminary sketches of the phenomenon of cross-speaker anaphora, one by Francez and Berg, and one by Gr...