Room A139, Psych. In the course of the past two decades the coverage of the theory, which at first was limited to a comparatively small number of linguistic phenomena, has been steadily extended. Early versions of DRT dealt with cases of pronominal and temporal anaphora, together with a few constructions involving predication, boolean connectors and quantification familiar from e.g. Montague Grammar and the basic tense constructions, without which it would have been impossible to deal with those anaphoric phenomena in any systematic way.
Recent versions cover a lot more.
A particularly important new domain of application is the theory of presupposition, which will be the subject of a number of specialized subjects in the second week. So we will, after a general introduction to the way the theory works and to the central motivations behind it, have to limit ourselves to sample treatments of some of these phenomena. To some extent this can be left to the interests of the audience. Since this inception in 1980 DRT has not only expanded but also undergone a number of modifications. The version I will present here is based on insights which go back in significant part to the work of Van Der Sandt, who adapted the general theory to the requirements of his DRT-based account of presupposition.