What's at Stack in Discourse
Modal subordination involves keeping track of temporarily derived context and making assertions
about them. This paper proposes a dynamic treatment in which such contexts are kept in a stack, on which relevant
linguistic expressions trigger operations of pushing, popping, etc. Utterances can be processed as they arrive,
without waiting for the modal context to be closed off. The stack formalism is then refined to account for more
phenomena. By assuming two stacks, one for each of the constituents of an information state (referent system and
set of possibilities), it becomes easy to implement the persistence of referents introduced by definites and
proper names in modal contexts.
Stefan H. Kaufmann