ABSTRACT
This thesis breaks with a long semantic tradition-going back at least to Frege, and running through Montague and beyond-which revolves around the individual sentence, articulating the meaning of all linguistic expressions in terms of their contributions to the truth-conditions of a sentence. By shifting the locus of truth-conditions in systematic theorizing to the discourse, discourse primacy shifts the traditional center of gravity in semantics. It recommends that we articulate the meaning of a sentence in terms of its potential to contribute to the truth-conditions, or informational content, of discourses in which it can occur. This idea was first developed by Kamp [1981] and (independently) by Heim [1982], in works that formed the starting point for subsequent theorizing in the dynamic tradition.
