Existence and Truth in Discourse

This book explores some of the most challenging questions at the interface of linguistics and philosophy, concerning the interpretation of references to existentially problematic entities. As well as the classic cases of non-existence, this book also considers fictional and real-world entities and develops a unified theory of interpretation which accounts for all of them.

In common with much other current work in the broad area, this account takes a stance at the level of discourse and assumes a procedural semantics, but argues for a much more central than usual use of context in determining truth-values and treats as crucial the effect of a hearer's knowledge on interpretation.

This is combined with a theory which handles existence in terms of possible worlds, taking a modal realistic stance and assuming an infinite and undifferentiated set, but arguing for an ordering of relations between worlds which allows a set of tight and efficient constraints on hearers' access to possible worlds during interpretation.