Presumptive Meanings

Presumptive Meanings PDF Author: Stephen C. Levinson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262621304
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
This is the first extended discussion of preferred interpretation in language understanding, integrating much of the best research in linguistic pragmatics from the last two decades. When we speak, we mean more than we say. In this book Stephen C. Levinson explains some general processes that underlie presumptions in communication. This is the first extended discussion of preferred interpretation in language understanding, integrating much of the best research in linguistic pragmatics from the last two decades. Levinson outlines a theory of presumptive meanings, or preferred interpretations, governing the use of language, building on the idea of implicature developed by the philosopher H.P. Grice. Some of the indirect information carried by speech is presumed by default because it is carried by general principles, rather than inferred from specific assumptions about intention and context. Levinson examines this class of general pragmatic inferences in detail, showing how they apply to a wide range of linguistic constructions. This approach has radical consequences for how we think about language and communication.

Presumptive Meanings

Presumptive Meanings PDF Author: Stephen C. Levinson
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262621304
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 516

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first extended discussion of preferred interpretation in language understanding, integrating much of the best research in linguistic pragmatics from the last two decades. When we speak, we mean more than we say. In this book Stephen C. Levinson explains some general processes that underlie presumptions in communication. This is the first extended discussion of preferred interpretation in language understanding, integrating much of the best research in linguistic pragmatics from the last two decades. Levinson outlines a theory of presumptive meanings, or preferred interpretations, governing the use of language, building on the idea of implicature developed by the philosopher H.P. Grice. Some of the indirect information carried by speech is presumed by default because it is carried by general principles, rather than inferred from specific assumptions about intention and context. Levinson examines this class of general pragmatic inferences in detail, showing how they apply to a wide range of linguistic constructions. This approach has radical consequences for how we think about language and communication.

Modern Statutory Interpretation

Modern Statutory Interpretation PDF Author: Jeffrey Barnes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108816029
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 817

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Book Description
Modern Statutory Interpretation is an original, clear, coherent and research-based account of contemporary Australian statutory interpretation. It provides a comprehensive coverage of statutory interpretation law, legislative drafting, the parliamentary process, the modern history of interpretation, sources of doubt, and interpretation techniques.

Meaning and Relevance

Meaning and Relevance PDF Author: Deirdre Wilson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 052176677X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.

Presumptive Design

Presumptive Design PDF Author: Leo Frishberg
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
ISBN: 0128030879
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Everything you know about the future is wrong. Presumptive Design: Design Provocations for Innovation is for people "inventing the future: future products, services, companies, strategies and policies. It introduces a design-research method that shortens time to insights from months to days. Presumptive Design is a fundamentally agile approach to identifying your audiences' key needs. Offering rapidly crafted artifacts, your teams collaborate with your customers to identify preferred and profitable elements of your desired outcome. Presumptive Design focuses on your users' problem space, informing your business strategy, your project's early stage definition, and your innovation pipeline. Comprising discussions of design theory with case studies and how-to's, the book offers business leadership, management and innovators the benefits of design thinking and user experience in the context of early stage problem definition. Presumptive Design is an advanced technique and quick to use: within days of reading this book, your research and design teams can apply the approach to capture a risk-reduced view of your future. - Provides actionable approaches to inform strategy and problem definition through design thinking - Offers a design-based research method to complement existing market, ethnographic and customer research methods - Demonstrates a powerful technique for identifying disruptive innovation early in the innovation pipeline by putting customers first - Presents each concept with case studies and exploration of risk factors involved including warnings for situations in which the technique can be misapplied

Legal Meanings

Legal Meanings PDF Author: Janet Giltrow
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110721007
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
This collection is about how law makes meaning and how meaning makes law. Through clear methodology and substantial findings, chapters expose the deficits of ‘literal’ meaning and the difficulties in 'ordinary' meaning, in international legal contexts and in more immediate social ones, as well as in courtrooms. Further, chapters in this volume see the challenges to national and international commitments to all speakers sharing a common meaning.

Meaning and Analysis: New Essays on Grice

Meaning and Analysis: New Essays on Grice PDF Author: Richard Breheny
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230282113
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
The anthology 'Meaning and Analysis' addresses the key topics of H. Paul Grice's philosophy of language, such as rationality, non-natural meaning, communicative actions, conversational implicatures, the semantics-pragmatics distinction and recent debates concerning minimalist versus contextualist semantics.

Intention, Common Ground and the Egocentric Speaker-Hearer

Intention, Common Ground and the Egocentric Speaker-Hearer PDF Author: Istvan Kecskes
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110211475
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This book presents current research that discusses some of the major issues in pragmatics from new perspectives, and directs attention to aspects of fundamental tenets that have been investigated only to a limited extent. Current pragmatic theories emphasize the importance of intention, cooperation, common ground, mutual knowledge, relevance, and commitment in executing communicative acts. However, recent research in cognitive psychology, linguistic pragmatics, and intercultural communication has raised questions that warrant some revision of these major tenets. Debates about the place of intention in pragmatics have indicated that Gricean intentions may play a less central role in communication than traditionally assumed. Cognitive psychologists pointed out that individual, egocentric endeavors of interlocutors play a much more decisive role in the initial stages of production and comprehension than current pragmatic theories envision. Some researchers criticized the Clark and Brennan's common ground model and Clark's contribution theory arguing that these approaches retain a communication-as-transfer-between-minds view of language, and treat intentions and goals as pre-existing psychological entities that are later somehow formulated in language. All these developments are addressed in the papers of the volume written by prominent scholars representing several disciplines.

Meaning in Linguistic Interaction

Meaning in Linguistic Interaction PDF Author: Katarzyna Jaszczolt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199602468
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This book offers a semantic and metasemantic inquiry into the representation of meaning in linguistic interaction. Kasia Jaszczolt's view represents the most radical stance on meaning to be found in the contextualist tradition and thereby the most radical take on the semantics/pragmatics boundary. It allows for the selection of the cognitively plausible object of enquiry without being constrained by such distinctions as what is said/what is implicated or what is linguistic and what is extralinguistic. She argues that this is the only promising stance on meaning. The analysis transcends the traditional distinctions drawn, and traditional questions posed, in post-Gricean pragmatics and philosophy of language. It heavily relies on the dynamic construction of meaning in discourse, using truth conditions as a tool but at the same time conforming to pragmatic compositionality ? whereby aspects of meaning that enter this composition have very different provenance. Meaning in Linguistic Interaction builds on the author's earlier work on Default Semantics and adds new arguments in favour of radical contextualism as well as novel applications, focusing on the role of salience, the flexibility of word meaning, the literal/nonliteral distinction, and the dynamic nature of a character, as well as offering an entirely new perspective on the indexical/nonindexical distinction. It contains a state-of-the-art discussion of the semantics/pragmatics boundary disputes, focusing on varieties of semantic minimalism and contextualism and on the limitations of an indexicalism. Jaszczolt's work is illustrated with examples from a variety of languages and offers some formal representations of meaning in the metalanguage of Default Semantics.

Logic, Meaning, and Conversation

Logic, Meaning, and Conversation PDF Author: Jay David Atlas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195350944
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
This fresh look at the philosophy of language focuses on the interface between a theory of literal meaning and pragmatics--a philosophical examination of the relationship between meaning and language use and its contexts. Here, Atlas develops the contrast between verbal ambiguity and verbal generality, works out a detailed theory of conversational inference using the work of Paul Grice on Implicature as a starting point, and gives an account of their interface as an example of the relationship between Chomsky's Internalist Semantics and Language Performance. Atlas then discusses consequences of his theory of the Interface for the distinction between metaphorical and literal language, for Grice's account of meaning, for the Analytic/Synthetic distinction, for Meaning Holism, and for Formal Semantics of Natural Language. This book makes an important contribution to the philosophy of language and will appeal to philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists.

Meaning in Linguistic Interaction

Meaning in Linguistic Interaction PDF Author: Kasia M. Jaszczolt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191068985
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
This book offers a semantic and metasemantic inquiry into the representation of meaning in linguistic interaction. Kasia Jaszczolt's view represents the most radical stance on meaning to be found in the contextualist tradition and thereby the most radical take on the semantics/pragmatics boundary. It allows for the selection of the cognitively plausible object of enquiry without being constrained by such distinctions as what is said/what is implicated or what is linguistic and what is extralinguistic. She argues that this is the only promising stance on meaning. The analysis transcends the traditional distinctions drawn, and traditional questions posed, in post-Gricean pragmatics and philosophy of language. It heavily relies on the dynamic construction of meaning in discourse, using truth conditions as a tool but at the same time conforming to pragmatic compositionality ? whereby aspects of meaning that enter this composition have very different provenance. Meaning in Linguistic Interaction builds on the author's earlier work on Default Semantics and adds new arguments in favour of radical contextualism as well as novel applications, focusing on the role of salience, the flexibility of word meaning, the literal/nonliteral distinction, and the dynamic nature of a character, as well as offering an entirely new perspective on the indexical/nonindexical distinction. It contains a state-of-the-art discussion of the semantics/pragmatics boundary disputes, focusing on varieties of semantic minimalism and contextualism and on the limitations of an indexicalism. Jaszczolt's work is illustrated with examples from a variety of languages and offers some formal representations of meaning in the metalanguage of Default Semantics.