Context and Presupposition

Context and Presupposition PDF Author: Rob A. van der Sandt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Context (Linguistics)
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This book, which has been written for linguists and philosophers working in the field of semantics, deals with presupposition and its dependence on context.

Context and Presupposition

Context and Presupposition PDF Author: Rob A. van der Sandt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Context (Linguistics)
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This book, which has been written for linguists and philosophers working in the field of semantics, deals with presupposition and its dependence on context.

Knowledge and Presuppositions

Knowledge and Presuppositions PDF Author: Michael Blome-Tillmann
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199686084
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Blome-Tillmann puts forth an innovative account of epistemic contextualism based on the idea that pragmatic presuppositions play a central role in the semantics of knowledge attributions. Using the resulting theory, he establishes its significance for a variety of issues within epistemology and the philosophy of language.

Presuppositions in Context

Presuppositions in Context PDF Author: Athulya Aravind (Ph. D.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
This dissertation is about the acquisition of presupposition. The specific focus is on the interplay between presuppositional content as hardwired in the semantics of particular expressions and the conversational contexts in which utterances containing those expressions may be used. A series of behavioral experiments examine what children in the preschool age range know about the pragmatic principles governing presupposition, and how they come to acquire this knowledge. The dissertation is organized into two thematic halves. The first half investigates the conditions that govern when presupposing something is appropriate, hence allow for the use of a presupposition triggering expression. Specifically, I ask: do young children know the common ground requirement - the formal requirement that presuppositions be previously established common knowledge - and do they know when and how this requirement can be violated? Two sets of experiments, using two presupposition-carrying expressions with importantly divergent properties (too and the), reveal that children, like adults, generate a default expectation that a presuppositional sentence be uttered to a listener who already takes for granted the presupposition. However, they hold onto this expectation even in circumstances where adult speakers do not. Unlike adults, children do not expect that an otherwise 'neutral' listener might accommodate a speaker's informative presupposition. Together, these findings point to a developmental path where the formal requirement - that presuppositions be presuppositions - is acquired before an understanding that the rule can be bent and how. The second half examines the conditions that make marking of presuppositions obligatory, hence require the use of a presupposition triggering expression. Are children sensitive to Maximize Presupposition! (Heim 1991) as a principle governing competition and utterance choice? The ability to deploy Maximize Presupposition! in an adult-like way shows a more protracted developmental trajectory. Moreover, children's ability to rule out presuppositionally weaker sentences seems to vary across competition environments. Taking the non-uniformity in development as signaling non-uniformity in the underlying phenomena, I develop an alternative account for a pair of expressions commonly thought to compete for Maximize Presupposition!: another vs. a. Ultimately, I suggest that Maximize Presupposition! is one of several pragmatic principles that lead to competition and selection of structures imposing the strongest contextual requirement. Children have command of some of these conditions, but not others. The acquisition trajectories are modulated by various factors, including the type of requirement imposed on the context (e.g. that some proposition is salient vs. accepted common belief) and the types of knowledge that are pre-requisites (e.g. knowledge of idiosyncratic properties of the lexicon).

Context

Context PDF Author: Robert Stalnaker
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199645167
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Robert Stalnaker explores the contexts in which speech takes place, the ways we represent them, and the roles they play in explaining the interpretation and dynamics of speech. His central thesis is the autonomy of pragmatics: the independence of theory about structure and function of discourse from theory about mechanisms serving those functions.

Context and Presupposition

Context and Presupposition PDF Author: Rob A. van der Sandt
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This book, which has been written for linguists and philosophers working in the field of semantics, deals with presupposition and its dependence on context.

Presuppositions in Context

Presuppositions in Context PDF Author: Athulya Aravind
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Presupposition (Logic)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This dissertation is about the acquisition of presupposition. The specific focus is on the interplay between presuppositional content as hardwired in the semantics of particular expressions and the conversational contexts in which utterances containing those expressions may be used. A series of behavioral experiments examine what children in the preschool age range know about the pragmatic principles governing presupposition, and how they come to acquire this knowledge. The dissertation is organized into two thematic halves. The first half investigates the conditions that govern when presupposing something is appropriate, hence allow for the use of a presupposition triggering expression. Specifically, I ask: do young children know the common ground requirement - the formal requirement that presuppositions be previously established common knowledge - and do they know when and how this requirement can be violated? Two sets of experiments, using two presupposition-carrying expressions with importantly divergent properties (too and the), reveal that children, like adults, generate a default expectation that a presuppositional sentence be uttered to a listener who already takes for granted the presupposition. However, they hold onto this expectation even in circumstances where adult speakers do not. Unlike adults, children do not expect that an otherwise 'neutral' listener might accommodate a speaker's informative presupposition. Together, these findings point to a developmental path where the formal requirement - that presuppositions be presuppositions - is acquired before an understanding that the rule can be bent and how. The second half examines the conditions that make marking of presuppositions obligatory, hence require the use of a presupposition triggering expression. Are children sensitive to Maximize Presupposition! (Heim 1991) as a principle governing competition and utterance choice? The ability to deploy Maximize Presupposition! in an adult-like way shows a more protracted developmental trajectory. Moreover, children's ability to rule out presuppositionally weaker sentences seems to vary across competition environments. Taking the non-uniformity in development as signaling non-uniformity in the underlying phenomena, I develop an alternative account for a pair of expressions commonly thought to compete for Maximize Presupposition!: another vs. a. Ultimately, I suggest that Maximize Presupposition! is one of several pragmatic principles that lead to competition and selection of structures imposing the strongest contextual requirement. Children have command of some of these conditions, but not others. The acquisition trajectories are modulated by various factors, including the type of requirement imposed on the context (e.g. that some proposition is salient vs. accepted common belief) and the types of knowledge that are pre-requisites (e.g. knowledge of idiosyncratic properties of the lexicon).

Optimality Theory and Pragmatics

Optimality Theory and Pragmatics PDF Author: Reinhard Blutner
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230501400
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Ten leading scholars provide exacting research results and a reliable and accessible introduction to the new field of optimality theoretic pragmatics. The book includes a general introduction that overviews the foundations of this new research paradigm. The book is intended to satisfy the needs of students and professional researchers interested in pragmatics and optimality theory, and will be of particular interest to those exploring the interfaces of formal pragmatics with grammar, semantics, philosophy of language, information theory and cognitive psychology.

The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory

The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory PDF Author: Shalom Lappin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119046823
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 771

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Book Description
The second edition of The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory presents a comprehensive introduction to cutting-edge research in contemporary theoretical and computational semantics. Features completely new content from the first edition of The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory Features contributions by leading semanticists, who introduce core areas of contemporary semantic research, while discussing current research Suitable for graduate students for courses in semantic theory and for advanced researchers as an introduction to current theoretical work

Context and Content

Context and Content PDF Author: Robert C. Stalnaker
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191519162
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
In Context and Content Robert Stalnaker develops a philosophical picture of the nature of speech and thought and the relations between them. Two themes in particular run through these collected essays: the role that the context in which speech takes place plays in accounting for the way language is used to express thought, and the role of the external environment in determining the contents of our thoughts. Stalnaker argues against the widespread assumption of the priority of linguistic over mental representation, which he suggests has had a distorting influence on our understanding. The first part of the book develops a framework for representing contexts and the way they interact with the interpretation of what is said in them. This framework is used to help to explain a range of linguistic phenomena concerning presupposition and assertion, conditional statements, the attribution of beliefs, and the use of names, descriptions, and pronouns to refer. Stalnaker then draws out the conception of thought and its content that is implicit in this framework. He defends externalism about thought—the assumption that our thoughts have the contents they have in virtue of the way we are situated in the world—and explores the role of linguistic action and linguistic structure in determining the contents of our thoughts. Context and Content offers philosophers and cognitive scientists a summation of Stalnaker's important and influential work in this area. His new introduction to the volume gives an overview of this work and offers a convenient way in for those who are new to it. The Oxford Cognitive Science series is a new forum for the best contemporary work in this flourishing field, where various disciplines—cognitive psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, and computational theory—join forces in the investigation of thought, awareness, understanding, and associated workings of the mind. Each book constitutes an original contribution to its subject, but will be accessible beyond the ranks of specialists, so as to reach a broad interdisciplinary readership. The series will be carefully shaped and steered with the aim of representing the most important developments in the field and bringing together its constituent disciplines.

The Oxford Handbook of Negation

The Oxford Handbook of Negation PDF Author: Viviane Déprez
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198830521
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 889

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Book Description
In this volume, international experts in negation provide a comprehensive overview of cross-linguistic and philosophical research in the field, as well as accounts of more recent results from experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. The volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach to a range of fundamental questions ranging from why negation displays so many distinct linguistic forms to how prosody and gesture participate in the interpretation of negative utterances. Following an introduction from the editors, the chapters are arranged in eight parts that explore, respectively, the fundamentals of negation; issues in syntax; the syntax-semantics interface; semantics and pragmatics; negative dependencies; synchronic and diachronic variation; the emergence and acquisition of negation; and experimental investigations of negation. The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers across a wide range of disciplines, and will facilitate further interdisciplinary work in the field.