"Monsters"
Abstract: This talk begins with a distinction between two notions of context that have played a role in semantic/pragmatic theorizing. The notions are not in competition – theory has room for both – but some problems arise when they are not carefully distinguished. One problem, which is the focus of this talk, concerns the notion of a monster, which is an operator that compositionally shifts the context. David Kaplan, who introduced the term, famously argued that there can be no monsters in natural language, but others have argued that there are monsters in English and other languages. I will argue that the ban on monsters, on one way of understanding it, is not a substantive constraint on the semantics, and that it can be reconciled with the apparent counterexample. But the example brings out that the abstract object that Kaplan’s theory labels a “context” is, in some of its uses in the semantics, not appropriately called by that name.
