Evidentiality and the Semantics-pragmatics Interface

Evidentiality and the Semantics-pragmatics Interface PDF Author: Bert Cornillie
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789027226891
Category : Evidentials
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this volume, the researcher interested in evidentiality and epistemic modality finds accounts of evidentials with epistemic overtones as well as analyses of the influence of contextual factors such as genre or speech-participants.

Evidentiality and the Semantics-pragmatics Interface

Evidentiality and the Semantics-pragmatics Interface PDF Author: Bert Cornillie
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789027226891
Category : Evidentials
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this volume, the researcher interested in evidentiality and epistemic modality finds accounts of evidentials with epistemic overtones as well as analyses of the influence of contextual factors such as genre or speech-participants.

Evidentials and Modals

Evidentials and Modals PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004436707
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
Evidentials and Modals offers an in-depth account of the meaning of grammatical elements related to evidentiality and modality, focusing on both theoretical and typological perspectives, ranging from Korean, Japanese, American Indian, Turkish and African languages.

Potential Questions at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface

Potential Questions at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface PDF Author: Edgar Onea
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004217932
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
In Potential Questions at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface Edgar Onea proposes a novel component for question under discussion based discourse pragmatic theories thereby combining such theories with new ideas from inquisitive semantics. He shows how potential questions account for an entire range of grammatical phenomena. These phenomena include the semantics of indefinite determiners, the meaning contribution of nominal appositives, specificational constructions and non restrictive relative clauses. This book delivers a comprehensive and empirically rich investigation into the role of questions in natural language interpretation. Drawing on data from German, English, Hungarian and Russian, Edgar Onea's study significantly broadens our understanding of conventional sensitivity to questions through formally rigorous analyses of specificational particles, parentheticals and indefinites. The Potential Questions framework offers a new and exciting perspective on utterance meanings as not just addressing, but also raising questions, with important consequences for integrated analyses of discourse structure and discourse relations. This book is essential reading for anybody interested in the semantics-pragmatics interface. Judith Tonhauser, The Ohio State University

Modality: Issues in the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface

Modality: Issues in the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface PDF Author: Anna Papafragou
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 0585474192
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This volume focuses on the interplay between grammatical and pragmatic factors in the comprehension of lexically communicated meaning. It uses a case-study, modality, in order to illustrate how the plasticity of lexically conveyed information can be accounted for without assuming semantic polysemy. The author's approach to the semantics and pragmatics of the English modal verbs is developed within the relevance-theoretic framework of communication.

Reliability in Pragmatics

Reliability in Pragmatics PDF Author: E. McCready
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191007404
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
This book is an exploration of how knowledge about the reliability of information sources manifests itself in linguistic phenomena and use. It focuses on cooperation in language use and on how considerations of reliability influence what is done with the information acquired through language. E. McCready provides a detailed account of the phenomena of hedging and evidentiality and analyses them using tools from game theory, dynamic semantics, and formal epistemology. Hedging is argued to be a mechanism used by speakers to protect their reputations for cooperativity from damage inflicted by infelicitous discourse moves. The pragmatics of evidential use is also discussed in terms of the histories of interaction that influence reputation: the author argues that past experience with the evidence source indexed by the evidential determines how the process of adding information will proceed. The book makes many new connections between seemingly disparate aspects of linguistic meaning and practice. It will be of interest to specialists in semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, as well as those in the fields of philosophy and cognitive science with an interest in language and epistemology.

The Semantics of Evidentials

The Semantics of Evidentials PDF Author: Sarah E. Murray
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191503797
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This book provides argues for a compositional, truth-conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. Central to the proposed theory is the distinction between what propositional content is at-issue and what content is not-at-issue. Evidentials contribute not-at-issue content, and can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, which is contributed by sentential mood. In this volume, Sarah Murray builds on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, and proposes a semantics that does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, she argues that all sentences make three semantic contributions: at-issue content, not-at-issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At-issue content is presented and made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground; not-at-issue content directly updates the common ground; and the illocutionary relation uses a proposition to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type, can trigger further updates. The analysis is supported by extensive empirical data from Cheyenne, drawn from the authors own fieldwork, as well as from English and a variety of other languages.

Evidence for Evidentiality

Evidence for Evidentiality PDF Author: Ad Foolen
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027263914
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Statements are always under the threat of the potential counter-question How do you know? To pre-empt this question, language users often indicate what kind of access they had to the communicated content: Their own perception, inference from other information, ‘hearsay’, etc. Such expressions, grammatical or lexical, have been studied in recent years under the cover term of evidentiality research. The present volume contributes 11 new studies to this flourishing field, all exploring evidential phenomena in a range of languages (Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Khalkha Mongolian, Spanish, Tibetan, Yurakaré), using a variety of methodologies. Evidential meaning is discussed in relation to other semantic dimensions, such as epistemic modality, semantic roles, commitment, quotative meaning, and tense. The volume is of interest to scholars and students who are interested in up-to-date methods and frameworks for studying evidential meaning and the various ways it is expressed in the languages of the world.

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics

The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics PDF Author: Dale A. Koike
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429849346
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 678

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics is the first volume to offer a comprehensive overview of advances in Spanish Pragmatics, addressing different types of interaction and the variables, both social and linguistic, that can affect them. Written by a diverse set of experts in the field, the handbook unifies two major approaches to the study of pragmatics, the Anglo-American and European Continental traditions. Thirty-three chapters cover in detail both pragmatic foundations (e.g. speech act theory, implicature and relevance, deixis) and interfaces with other concepts, including: • Discourse • Variation; Culture and interculture • (Im)politeness; humor • Learning contexts and teaching • Technology This is an ideal reference for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, and researchers of Spanish language and linguistics.

Analyzing meaning

Analyzing meaning PDF Author: Paul R. Kroeger
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3961101361
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 502

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Book Description
This book provides an introduction to the study of meaning in human language, from a linguistic perspective. It covers a fairly broad range of topics, including lexical semantics, compositional semantics, and pragmatics. The chapters are organized into six units: (1) Foundational concepts; (2) Word meanings; (3) Implicature (including indirect speech acts); (4) Compositional semantics; (5) Modals, conditionals, and causation; (6) Tense & aspect. Most of the chapters include exercises which can be used for class discussion and/or homework assignments, and each chapter contains references for additional reading on the topics covered. As the title indicates, this book is truly an INTRODUCTION: it provides a solid foundation which will prepare students to take more advanced and specialized courses in semantics and/or pragmatics. It is also intended as a reference for fieldworkers doing primary research on under-documented languages, to help them write grammatical descriptions that deal carefully and clearly with semantic issues. The approach adopted here is largely descriptive and non-formal (or, in some places, semi-formal), although some basic logical notation is introduced. The book is written at level which should be appropriate for advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate students. It presupposes some previous coursework in linguistics, but does not presuppose any background in formal logic or set theory.

Evidential Marking in European Languages

Evidential Marking in European Languages PDF Author: Björn Wiemer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110726076
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 749

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Book Description
How are evidential functions distinguished by means other than grammatical paradigms, i.e. by function words and other lexical units? And how inventories of such means can be compared across languages (against an account also of grammatical means used to mark information source)? This book presents an attempt at supplying a comparative survey of such inventories by giving detailed “evidential profiles” for a large part of European languages: Continental Germanic, English, French, Basque, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Modern Greek, and Ibero-Romance languages, such as Catalán, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish. Each language is treated in a separate chapter, and their profiles are based on a largely unified set of concepts based on function and/or etymological provenance. The profiles are preceded by a chapter which clarifies the theoretical premises and methodological background for the format followed in the profiles. The concluding chapter presents a synthesis of findings from these profiles, including areal biases and the formulation of methodological problems that call for further research.