Abstract: The dynamic approach posits that a presupposition
must be satisfied in its local context. But how is a local context
derived from the global one? Extant dynamic analyses must specify in
the lexical entries of operators what their ‘context change potentials’
are, and for this very reason they fail to be explanatory. To
circumvent the problem, we revise two assumptions of the dynamic
approach: we take the update process to be derivative from a classical,
non-dynamic semantics - which obviates the need for dynamic lexical
entries; and we deny that a local context encodes what the speech act
participants ‘take for granted’. Instead, we take the local
context of an expression E in
a sentence S to be the
smallest domain that one may restrict attention to when assessing E without jeopardizing the truth
conditions of S. Local
contexts may be computed incrementally or symmetrically: in the
incremental case, only information about the expressions that precede E is taken into account; in the
symmetric case, all of S
(except E) is accessed. The
resulting theory of local satisfaction is shown to be equivalent to the
‘Transparency theory’ of presuppositions (Schlenker 2007a,b), whose
incremental version is nearly equivalent to Heim’s dynamic semantics.
But unlike the Transparency theory, the present account makes it
possible to compute in great generality the semantic contribution of an
expression in its local context - and thus to offer a general theory of
redundancy, and possibly of presupposition generation. This account can
thus be seen as a synthesis between the Transparency theory and dynamic
semantics.