Dr. Anthony Gillies will conduct research on how speakers and hearers exchange information using modal and conditional constructions in natural language. There is widespread agreement that these constructions are context-sensitive: what utterances of them mean is a function in part of the mutual presuppositions between the speaker and hearer about what scenarios are relevant. For example, sentences of the form "It might be that p" mean (roughly) that some of the relevant scenarios are scenarios in which p is true. But sometimes a speaker may take for granted more than their hearers do (their presuppositions about relevant scenarios not matching). If the conversation is to proceed the hearer needs to accommodate by changing her picture of what the common ground is, thus changing what he or she takes the set of relevant scenarios to be. The dynamics of this process, what its constraints are, and how it interfaces with the compositional semantics of modal and conditional constructions, are not well understood. This project focuses on accommodation both to advance what is known about these constructions and to advance the general understanding of how context and semantic value interact. Since the confluence of context dependence and contextual dynamics at the point of accommodation implicates both the speaker's and hearer's beliefs about what is shared information, the project will also promote a more general understanding of natural language by relating semantics to larger questions about how agents reason about and exchange information about a complex, dynamic world full of other agents.
