Semantics and Contextual Expression

Semantics and Contextual Expression PDF Author: R. Bartsch
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110877333
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "Semantics and Contextual Expression".

Semantics and Contextual Expression

Semantics and Contextual Expression PDF Author: R. Bartsch
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110877333
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
No detailed description available for "Semantics and Contextual Expression".

Understanding Semantics

Understanding Semantics PDF Author: Sebastian Loebner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134647158
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
This series provides approachable, yet authoritative, introductions to all the major topics in linguistics. Ideal for students with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics, each book carefully explains the basics, emphasising understanding of the essential notions rather than arguing for a particular theoretical position. Understanding Semantics offers a complete introduction to linguistic semantics. The book takes a step-by-step approach, starting with the basic concepts and moving through the central questions to examine the methods and results of the science of linguistic meaning. Understanding Semantics unites the treatment of a broad scale of phenomena using data from different languages with a thorough investigation of major theoretical perspectives. It leads the reader from their intuitive knowledge of meaning to a deeper understanding of the use of scientific reasoning in the study of language as a communicative tool, of the nature of linguistic meaning, and of the scope and limitations of linguistic semantics. Ideal as a first textbook in semantics for undergraduate students of linguistics, this book is also recommended for students of literature, philosophy, psychology and cognitive science.

The Semantics of Opinion

The Semantics of Opinion PDF Author: Melanie Bervoets
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9402417478
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This volume sets out to provide a semantics for the "future-directed opining verbs", a novel class whose members are used to describe subjects' externally attested opinions toward future possibilities. Including verbs like recommend, promise, and permit, the class can be situated within a broader range of opinion verbs, including the well-known propositional attitudes, and key to the investigation here are differences among these groups along the lines of available event types, interaction with the common ground, and restrictions on subjects and objects. Other important semantic topics implicated in the discussion are dispositions, free choice disjunction, and Neg-raising/embedded NPI licensing, and the host of new data associated with the future-directed opining verbs prompts surveys of the expanded scope of these phenomena, and corresponding re-evaluation of existing theories. Collectively, the contributions of this work deepen our understanding of predicates that describe opinion and disposition, and how these interact with fundamental logical operations like negation and disjunction, highlighting the crucial role of contextual factors like relevance for these processes.

Text and Context

Text and Context PDF Author: Teun A. van Dijk
Publisher: Longman Publishing Group
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description


The Meaning of Meaning

The Meaning of Meaning PDF Author: Charles Kay Ogden
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language and languages
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description


Felicitous Underspecification

Felicitous Underspecification PDF Author: King
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192857053
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 177

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Book Description
Felicitous uses of contextually sensitive expressions generally have unique semantic values in context. For example, a felicitous use of the singular pronoun 'she' generally has a single female as its unique semantic value in context. In the present work, Jeffrey C. King argues that contextually sensitive expressions have felicitous uses where they lack unique semantic values in context. He calls such uses instances of felicitous underspecification. In such cases, he says that the underspecified expression is associated with a range of candidate semantic values in context. King provides a rule for updating the Stalnakerian common ground when sentences containing felicitous underspecified expressions are uttered and accepted in a conversation. He also gives an account of the mechanism that associates the range of candidate semantic values in context with an underspecified expression. Sentences containing felicitous underspecified expressions can be embedded in various constructions. King considers the result of embedding such sentences under negation and verbs of propositional attitude. He also considers the question of why some uses of underspecified expressions are felicitous and others aren't. This investigation yields the notion of a context being appropriate for a sentence (LF), where a context is appropriate for a sentence containing an underspecified expression if the sentence is felicitous in that context. Finally, he considers some difficulties that arise in virtue of the fact that pronouns and demonstratives have some sorts of implications of uniqueness that clash with their being underspecified.

Semantics Versus Pragmatics

Semantics Versus Pragmatics PDF Author: Zoltan Gendler Szabo
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199251517
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 476

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Book Description
This is a collection of papers by leading scholars in the philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics on how semantics and pragmatics embed into a larger theory of interpretation and also on the disputed territories between these disciplines.

Discourse Contextualism

Discourse Contextualism PDF Author: Alex Silk
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191086525
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book investigates context-sensitivity in natural language by examining the meaning and use of a target class of theoretically recalcitrant expressions. These expressions-including epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague language ("CR-expressions")-exhibit systematic differences from paradigm context-sensitive expressions in their discourse dynamics and embedding properties. Many researchers have responded by rethinking the nature of linguistic meaning and communication. Drawing on general insights about the role of context in interpretation and collaborative action, Silk develops an improved contextualist theory of CR-expressions within the classical truth-conditional paradigm: Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the distinctive linguistic behavior of a CR-expression from a particular contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. It is shown how in using CR-expressions, speakers can exploit their mutual grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to coordinate their attitudes and negotiate about how the context should evolve. The book focuses primarily on developing a Discourse Contextualist semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals. The Discourse Contextualist framework is also applied to other categories of epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague adjectives. The similarities/differences among these expressions, and among context-sensitive expressions more generally, have been underexplored. The development of Discourse Contextualism in this book sheds light on general features of meaning and communication, and the variety of ways in which context affects and is affected by uses of language. Discourse Contextualism provides a fruitful framework for theorizing about various broader issues in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science.

Language in Context

Language in Context PDF Author: Jason Stanley
Publisher: Clarendon Press
ISBN: 0191527556
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Natural languages all contain constructions the interpretation of which depends upon the situation in which they are used. In Language and Context, Jason Stanley presents a series of essays which develop a theory of how the situation in which we speak interacts with the words we use to help produce what we say. The reason we can so smoothly operate with sentences that can be used to express very different items of information, Stanley argues, is that there are linguistically mandated constraints on the effects of the situation on what we say. These linguistically mandated constraints are most evident in the cases of sentences containing explicit pronouns, such as 'She is a mathematician', where interpretation of the information expressed is guided by the use of the pronoun 'she'. But even when such explicit pronouns are lacking, our sentences provide similar cues to allow our interlocutors to determine the information expressed. We are, in the main, confident that our interlocutors will smoothly grasp what we say, because the grammar and meaning of our sentences encodes these constraints. In defending this theory, Stanley pays close attention to specific cases of context-sensitive constructions, such as quantified noun phrases, comparative adjectives, and conditionals. Philosophers and cognitive scientist have appealed to the dependence of what is intuitively said by a sentence on the situation in which it is uttered to argue against the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language. The theory developed in this book is a vigorous defence of the possibility of a systematic theory of meaning for natural language against these influential tendencies.

Semantics

Semantics PDF Author: James R. Hurford
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521289498
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Introduces the major elements of semantics in a simple, step-by-step fashion. Sections of explanation and examples are followed by practice exercises with answers and comment provided.