Download or read book Context and Presupposition written by Rob A. van der Sandt and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, which has been written for linguists and philosophers working in the field of semantics, deals with presupposition and its dependence on context.
Download or read book Knowledge and Presuppositions written by Michael Blome-Tillmann and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Presuppositions in Context written by Athulya Aravind (Ph. D.) and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).
Download or read book Context written by Robert Stalnaker and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2014 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Context and Presupposition written by Rob A. van der Sandt and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, which has been written for linguists and philosophers working in the field of semantics, deals with presupposition and its dependence on context.
Download or read book Presuppositions in Context written by Athulya Aravind and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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).
Download or read book The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory written by Shalom Lappin and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 771 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book Context in Communication A Cognitive View written by Gabriella Airenti and published by Frontiers Media SA. This book was released on 2017-04-03 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Context is what contributes to interpret a communicative act beyond the spoken words. It provides information essential to clarify the intentions of a speaker, and thus to identify the actual meaning of an utterance. A large amount of research in Pragmatics has shown how wide-ranging and multifaceted this concept can be. Context spans from the preceding words in a conversation to the general knowledge that the interlocutors supposedly share, from the perceived environment to features and traits that the participants in a dialogue attribute to each other. This last category is also very broad, since it includes mental and emotional states, together with culturally constructed knowledge, such as the reciprocal identification of social roles and positions. The assumption of a cognitive point of view brings to the foreground a number of new questions regarding how information about the context is organized in the mind and how this kind of knowledge is used in specific communicative situations. A related, very important question concerns the role played in this process by theory of mind abilities (ToM), both in typical and atypical populations. In this Research Topic, we bring together articles that address different aspects of context analysis from theoretical and empirical perspectives, integrating knowledge and methods derived from Philosophy of language, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Clinical Psychology.
Download or read book The Role of Presupposition in the Comprehension of Sentences in Context written by Jennifer Langford and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Optimality Theory and Pragmatics written by Reinhard Blutner and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-12-19 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Context and Content written by Robert C. Stalnaker and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1999-04-08 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Presupposition and Context written by Arnim von Stechow and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Context Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning written by Hans Kamp and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-01 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of papers addresses context-dependence and methods for dealing with it. The book also records comments to the papers and the authors' replies to the comments. In this way, the contributions themselves are contextually dependent. It represents an inquiry into the activities on the semantics side of the pragmatics boundary.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Negation written by Viviane Déprez and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-03-31 with total page 889 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Presupposition written by Choon-Kyu Oh and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-01-13 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Partitioned Representations written by John Dinsmore and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1991 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One: Nuts and Bolts.- 1. Mental Representation.- Symbolism: The Classical Paradigm.- Cracks in the Symbolic Paradigm.- Connectionism: The Other Paradigm.- Methods of Models.- Assessing Theories of Mental Representation.- 2. Partitioned Representations.- General Overview.- The Contents of Spaces.- Parochial Reasoning.- Primary Contexts.- Partitioned Semantics.- Coherence.- Consolidation.- Secondary Contexts.- A Typology of Spaces.- Where Partitioned Representations Get Their Power.- Summary and Conclusions.- 3. Language: Process and Structure.- A Simple Philosophy of Language.- Linguistic Explanation.- The Process of Language Understanding.- Linguistic Evidence for Mental Representations.- 4. Three Levels of Language Processing.- Parochial Processing.- Distribution.- Contextualization.- An Example Discourse.- Conclusions.- Two: Studies in Language.- 5. Pedro's Donkey and Oedipus's Mother.- Some Common Parochial Linguistic Processes.- Some Common Cases of Distribution.- Interaction of Distribution and Parochial Processes.- Summary and Conclusions.- 6. Satisfying Presuppositions in Discourse.- The Problem of Presupposition.- Presupposition and Parochial Processing.- What Happens in Complex Sentences?.- Conclusions.- 7. Space Frogs and Henry Ford.- Linguistic Evidence for Contextualization.- The Semantic Contributions of Space Cues.- Summary.- 8. Temporal Aspect.- Reference Time: Temporal Perspective.- Semantics and Construction.- Reference Time: Contextualization.- The Case of the Present Perfect.- Conclusion.- 9. General Conclusions.- An Assessment of Partitioned Representations.- Prospectus.- The Importance of Partitioned Representations.- Appendices: Formal Models.- 10. A Logic of Partitioned Representations.- The Syntax of PR.- Rules of Inference for PR.- The Semantics of PR.- Soundness.- Conclusions.- 11. Generalized Natural Deduction.- Generalized Natural Deduction.- Time and Action.- Frames.- Summary and Conclusions.- 12. A Computational Model.- The Design of Spaceprobe.- Customizing Digestion.- Restructuring Rules for Distribution.- Handling Queries.- Language Understanding in Spaceprobe.- Summary.- References.- Author Index.
Download or read book The Geography of Context written by Nicholas Fotion and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-01-09 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When we use language, we presuppose many different things. Context is another name for these presuppositions. But it also can be the name of all these different presuppositions ordered in a certain way. This study of context focuses on the differences since many studies of context focus excessively on usage found in the sciences and in everyday observations. Other uses such as promising, giving directions, evaluating (i.e., ranking) all sorts of things around us, expressing our feelings, and issuing declarations (e.g., “You are promoted”) are equally important. The analogy of ‘geography,’ as used in this study, suggests that one important way to study context is to attend to all, not just one, of the “continents” found in the “planet” that we call context. Once we learn our geography lesson, we come to a better understanding of how context can change, how it can be ordered, and how it can be examined. We also learn how layered, and thus how complicated it is.
