Transsentential Meditations; Ups and downs in dynamic semantics Paul Dekker Abstract: This dissertation is concerned with a number of fundamental, theoretical and empirical issues in the dynamic semantics of natural language. In dynamic semantics, the meaning of a sentence is not represented in isolation, but in terms of the ability to change certain states. Dekker gives a type-theoretical formulation of Groenendijk and Stokhof's dynamic Montague grammar ({\em DMG}). He uses an extensional language with a modeltheoretic interpretation, which gives a compositional account of discourse theoretical results, such as intersentential anaphoric relations between indefinite expressions and anaphoric pronouns. The second chapter presents an analysis of anaphoric relations in natural language that are outside the more traditional discourse representation and dynamic paradigms. Dekker proposes two important general changes: (i) structural sentence type lifting and (ii) a sophisticated form of dynamic negation. One of the advantages of the resulting system is that it can be reformulated in terms of the original system with a number of closing operations. The third chapter shows that the resulting system is derivable from the most simple Montagovian interpretation system, with the use of existing type-changing rules associated with an appropriate interpretation. Therefore, this simple system might be better than the system proposed in the previous chapter. Therefore, in chapter 4, {\em DMG} is again the primary system. Dekker shows that dynamic techniques, developed to account for intersentential meaning relations, are well-suited for intrasentential relations, in particular the specification of implicit arguments. Analyses of relational nomina, adverbial modifiers, and temporal relations are reformulated with the use of existential disclosure, a kind of reversed existential closure. The last chapter takes dynamic predicate logic {\em DPL} as a starting point, and presents an `update' semantics for this system. The resulting system presents interpretation of a sentence as an update function of information states, more specifically, partial information about (partial) objects. This system is extended with quantificational expressions, adnominal as well as adverbial.