The Dynamics of Apposition
Chris Potts (UMass Amherst)

Amaral et al. (in Linguistics and Philosophy 30:707-749, 2007) is a critical review of Potts 2005 (The Logic of Conventional Implicatures). The review implicitly poses two interesting challenges. First, can we develop a dynamics of apposition that captures the special role appositives play in discourse? Second, given that (pace Potts) appositive content can be evaluated from a non- speaker perspective, what conditions facilitate such perspective shifting? The present talk seeks to meet both these challenges. The dynamic account is informed by a range of corpus evidence, and it improves greatly on the proposal of Potts 2005, in its coverage and its connections with pragmatic theory.