| Language is an effective way of human’s communication. To achieve this functionalcommunicational aim, languages users should be clear, sensible, and easy to understand. Whereaslanguages receivers should take up the speakers’ words accurately, or in other words, get speakers’meaning. In Linguistics, Semantics is just defined as the science of the meaning of language.Since the birth of Semantics. From1970s, it began to become the core of linguistic research fromthe edge of a grammar theory, and it laid a foundation for development as well. At the initial stageof development, linguists have been within the framework of Generative Grammar, Semanticswould be seen as a lack of regularities, lack of a clear sense of the program and have not beenfully developed in the field. In1970s, Richard Montague’s radical theories of how formal logiccould be used to describe natural language changed the way logicians and linguists perceived theconnections between their fields. The theory is exemplified in what has been termed MontagueGrammar. And Montague Grammar is also called Logical Semantics, Formal Semantics. Itanswered what is meaning, what is the true value of the sentence, and other core issues withinSemantics. However, influenced by Chomsky’s Theory of Syntax, Montague targeted to generateall qualified sentence. Thus classical Logic Semantics is a static Semantics which made qualifiedsentences as the largest studying unit.Since the1980s, with the breakthroughs of Kamp (1981), Heim (1982), and other linguists,Semantics as a whole began to change the pattern, people’s awareness also changed a lot: withoutthe concept of dynamic, the prevalence of anaphora structure in natural language is still unable toget a perfect explanation. Only depending on the concept of “possible world”, the understandingof the significance is not complete. In the scope of Dynamic Semantics, it is also reflected as thereplacement of information, a function of a message from one state to another. The dynamicperspective can be viewed as a description of a new approach that can be attached to the previousone to explain language phenomenon. Moreover, these new approaches are more suitable for thephenomenon of anaphora, just like donkey sentence.Based on the above understanding, I use the contrastive method to study the Dynamicdevelopment trend of Semantics from anaphora structure just like donkey sentence. This thesisconsists of five chapters. The first chapter is the intention and meanings of my study. In the secondchapter, it is a brief review of the previous studies on Dynamic Semantics and presents the central argument of this thesis. In the chapter three, I make a contrastive study between DynamicSemantics and Traditional Formal Semantics. Each dynamic theory has their own changes,supplement, development and breakthrough though each theory focuses on different angles. DRTanalyzes every sentence in a discourse step by step. SS also breaks the limitations of core conceptsin Possible World Semantics and raises the concept of “context”. In chapter four, I will make acontrastive study between DRT and SS. Moreover, as donkey sentence is the basis of the researchof Dynamic Semantics, almost every dynamic semantic theory mentions it and analyzes it. I willtreat donkey sentence as the basic point of comparison of two theories, and point out thesimilarities and differences between the two theories. Finally, in the chapter five, I make aconclusion. Though Dynamic Semantics greatly expand the scope of traditional Formal Semantics,it still insists on the classical methods of describing. As a result, the conclusion is that DynamicSemantic theories remain the continued development of Formal Semantics. |
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