Felicitous Underspecification

This book argues that contextually sensitive expressions have felicitous uses in which they lack unique semantic values in context. It formulates a rule for updating the Stalnakerian common ground in cases in which an accepted sentence contains an expression lacking a unique semantic value in context.

Jeffrey C. King completed his Ph.D. at the University of California, San Diego in 1985. He taught at California State
University, San Bernardino from 1985-1990. Professor King then moved to University of California, Davis, where
he taught from 1991-2004. In 2004 he took a job at University of Southern California, where he remained until
2007. He moved to Rutgers University in 2007, where he currently teaches. He became Distinguished Professor
there in 2011. His main research areas are philosophy of language, formal semantics, philosophical logic, and
metaphysics.

Introduction
1: Felicitous underspecification and updates
2: An update rule for cases of felicitous underspecification
3: Felicitous underspecification and metasemantics
4: Embeddings
5: Appropriateness
6: The problem of definites and possessives