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 Language in its multifarious aspects written by Petr Sgall and published by Karolinum Press. This book was released on 2006-04-01 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exceptional book of selected essays by the leading Czech linguist and member of the Prague Linguistic Circle contains 26 essays in English and 4 in German. It presents the wide scope of Sgall's interest and in six parts introduces the main spheres of author's interest - the first part of the book deals with general and theoretical questions, the second contains Sgall's contribution to syntax, the third covers the functional sentence perspective, the fourth sentences and discourse, the fifth language typology and the last part covers speech and writing
Download or read book Numerous Meanings written by Bert Bultinck and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-10-25 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outlandish as it may seem to the uninitiated, the meaning of English cardinal numbers has been the object of many heated and fascinating debates. Notwithstanding the numerous important objections that have been formulated in the last three decades, the (neo-)Gricean, scalar account is still the standard semantic description of numerals. In this book, Bultinck writes the history of this implicature-driven approach and demonstrates that it suffers from methodological insecurity and postulates highly non-conventional meanings of numerals as their "literal meaning", while it confuses the level of lexical semantics with that of utterances and cannot deal with a large number of counter-examples. Relying on the results of an extensive corpus-based analysis, an alternative account of the meaning of English cardinals and the ways in which their interpretation is influenced by other linguistic elements is presented. As such, this analysis constitutes a prism that offers todays linguist an iridescent history of one of the most fascinating, if often misconstrued, topics in contemporary meaning research: the conversational implicatures.
Download or read book The Grammar Pragmatics Interface written by Nancy Hedberg and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007-05-15 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of papers celebrates the work of Jeanette K. Gundel, who has contributed to the field of the grammar-pragmatics interface through her publications on the syntactic realization of topic and comment and the cognitive status of referring expressions, as well as by inspiring colleagues to make contributions to the overall field of pragmatics. This volume collects together papers from colleagues and former students on pragmatics and syntax, pragmatics and reference, and pragmatics and social variables. The volume includes papers devoted to explicating the grammar-pragmatics interface, with the focus of the papers ranging from Gricean and post-Gricean pragmatics, construction grammar, and genre theory to formal semantics, as well as papers devoted to expanding on Gundel's own original approach to factors such as the cognitive status decisions underlying speakers' choice of referring expression and the topic and focus decisions underlying speakers' choice of syntactic construction.
Download or read book Semantics Volume 1 written by Claudia Maienborn and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-07-27 with total page 989 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "SEMANTICS (MAIENBORN ET AL.) BD. 33.1 HSK E-BOOK".
Download or read book Lexical Meaning in Context written by Nicholas Asher and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the amalgamation of a predicate and argument would produce what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle called a 'category mistake'. It argues for a theory in which words get assigned both an intension and a type. The book develops a rich system of types and investigates its philosophical and formal implications, for example the abandonment of the classic Church analysis of types that has been used by linguists since Montague. The author integrates fascinating and puzzling observations about lexical meaning into a compositional semantic framework. Adjustments in types are a feature of the compositional process and account for various phenomena including coercion and copredication. This book will be of interest to semanticists, philosophers, logicians and computer scientists alike.
Download or read book Information Structure written by Malte Zimmermann and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-10-29 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book leading scholars provide state-of-the-art overviews of approaches to the formal expression of information structure in natural language and its interaction with general principles of human cognition and communication. They present critical accounts of current understanding of how aspects of grammar, such as prosody, syntax, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics, interact in the packing and unpacking of information in communication. They also look at the psycholinguistics behind the production and perception of information-structural categories. The book reflects the advances in recent research on all central aspects of the subject, including concepts of focus versus background, topic versus comment, and given versus new, and the kinds of inferences required to make sense of different combinations of words, syntax, intonation, and context. The chapters include typological and diachronic perspectives on information structure. Taken as a whole the book demonstrates the productive value of combining theoretical and experimental approaches.
Download or read book Reference and Anaphoric Relations written by H.K. von Heusinger and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2001-11-30 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The notions of reference and anaphoric relations have been discussed since antiquity and they are still one of the most challenging subjects in linguistics, logics and philosophy of language. The quest for a satisfying account of anaphoric reference has initiated a wide range of new and interesting approaches in formal semantics; and recent research confirms the old insight that reference and anaphoricity are closely interrelated issues. This volume brings together fifteen original research articles on the representation and interpretation of indefinite and definite noun phrases, anaphoric pronouns, and closely related issues such as scope and quantifier movement. The analyses are worked out within discourse representation theory, file change semantics, and dynamic logic, a family of recent frameworks developed for the formal analysis of discourse semantics. Particular attention is paid to E-type theories of pronouns and to the use of choice functions in the semantics of noun phrases. The papers collected in this volume shed light on the question of how linguistic expressions establish reference and anaphoric relations. The use of choice function approaches within dynamic semantics opens new research perspectives on these questions. Audience: This book will be of interest to scholars and students of linguistics, logicians, philosophers of language, computational linguists, and computer scientists with an interest in the semantics of natural language.
Download or read book Literal Meaning written by François Recanati and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a provocative contribution to the current debate about the best delimitation of semantics and pragmatics. Is 'What is said' determined by linguistic conventions, or is it an aspect of 'speaker's meaning'? Do we need pragmatics to fix truth-conditions? What is 'literal meaning'? To what extent is semantic composition a creative process? How pervasive is context-sensitivity? Recanati provides an original and insightful defence of 'contextualism', and offers an informed survey of the spectrum of positions held by linguists and philosophers working at the semantics/pragmatics interface.
Download or read book Computing Meaning written by Harry Bunt and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-07-03 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an in-depth view of the current issues, problems and approaches in the computation of meaning as expressed in language. Aimed at linguists, computer scientists, and logicians with an interest in the computation of meaning, this book focuses on two main topics in recent research in computational semantics. The first topic is the definition and use of underspecified semantic representations, i.e. formal structures that represent part of the meaning of a linguistic object while leaving other parts unspecified. The second topic discussed is semantic annotation. Annotated corpora have become an indispensable resource both for linguists and for developers of language and speech technology, especially when used in combination with machine learning methods. The annotation in corpora has only marginally addressed semantic information, however, since semantic annotation methodologies are still in their infancy. This book discusses the development and application of such methodologies.
Download or read book Dynamic Semantics written by Paul J.E. Dekker and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-07-03 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The integrated theory of dynamic interpretation set out here will be a surprise to advanced researchers in linguistics. It combines classical formal semantics and modern dynamic semantics without altering the fundamental paradigm. At the book’s core lies a pragmatically motivated notion of a dynamic conjunction of meanings, an idea that is worked out in full formal detail. This is applied to linguistic phenomena that involve anaphora, quantification and modality. The author demonstrates that in each area of application existing data can be neatly combined with new dynamic insights, but more importantly, there is a genuine further pay-off: the work generates treatments of phenomena that were not initially intended, with functional readings of pronouns and quantifiers, ‘Hob-Nob’ sentences, and insights into what we now call ‘Pierce’s Puzzle’. The outcome of a decade of work by the Amsterdam School of dynamic semantics, this volume condenses and reflects upon a vital body of research.
Download or read book The Composition of Meaning written by Alice G. B. ter Meulen and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the modular design of generative theory the syntaxsemantics interface has accounted all along for meanings at the level of Logical Form. The syntaxpragmatics interface, on the other hand, is the result of what one may call the 'pragmatic turn' in the linguistic theory, where content is partitioned into given and new information. In other words, the structural division of the clause has been subjected to criteria of information, or discourse structure. Both interfaces require a structurally descriptive inventory whose specific shapes can be motivated on theory-internal grounds only. The present collection of original articles develops the concept of these interfaces further. The papers in the first section focus on the syntaxsemantics interface, those in the second section on the syntaxpragmatics interface.
Download or read book Questions in Dynamic Semantics written by Maria Aloni and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of questions and answers is challenging for various fields of theoretical linguistics, logic, analytical philosophy, and more recently computer science. Research into questions and answers addresses old and raises new and important questions about the semantics / pragmatics interface and about the dynamics of interpretation. This book brings together current work on the topic as it has been developed in Amsterdam, and congenial academic sites, over the past 15 years. Amsterdam is one of the breeding grounds for the formal study of logic and language, for dynamic semantics, and for the study of questions and answers. It covers the major issues of pragmatic/semantic investigation, including logical relations, context dependence, information structure, and more. It illustrates how semantic/pragmatic stance can be used for problems in other areas of linguistic theorising.
Download or read book Accentuation and Interpretation written by H. Schmitz and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-01-23 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Develops a highly original theory of accentuation in which accentuation serves the mere pragmatic function of making utterances well comprehensible. Semantic effects of accentuation are explained as epiphenomena of pragmatic accentuation. The theory is formally elaborated in a model-theoretic framework and experimentally justified.
Download or read book A Theory of Conventional Implicature and Pragmatic Markers in Chinese written by Guangwu Feng and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2010 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conventional implicature is itself a highly controversial term, understood very differently by various brands of contemporary pragmatic theory. This book sets out to advance a Gricean theoretical framework of conventional implicature. It also intends to offer an analysis of pragmatic markers in Chinese.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Information Structure written by Caroline Féry and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 993 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.
Download or read book Semantics Theories written by Claudia Maienborn and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in paperback for the first time since its original publication, the material gathered here is perfect for anyone who needs a detailed and accessible introduction to the important semantic theories. Designed for a wide audience, it will be of great value to linguists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists working on natural language. The book covers theories of lexical semantics, cognitively oriented approaches to semantics, compositional theories of sentence semantics, and discourse semantics. This clear, elegant explanation of the key theories in semantics research is essential reading for anyone working in the area.
