On the proper treatment of context in NL

Abstract

The proper treatment of quantification in Natural Language proposed by Richard Montague some thirty years ago does not do proper justice to the fact that interpretation of texts both uses context and sets up new contexts. The dynamic turn in NL semantics is the attempt to model this basic fact, but the use of dynamically quantified variables introduces an undesirable element into this attempt. By extending a variable free `incremental dynamics\' with a flexible system of type scheme patterns and type scheme pattern matching, we arrive at a Montague style architecture for NL semantics that provides a proper treatment both of quantification and of context use and context change